How did so much salt get from the oceans and seas onto the land?
We think most of it has come in from wind blown accession from the oceans. Something like 20 to 200 kilograms per hectare per year. Because Australia wasn’t swept clean by the ice sheets 10,000 years ago like in the northern hemisphere, we’ve had soils that have been accumulating salts for hundreds of thousands of years. If you do your sums you can soon account for a lot of the salt that’s in the Australian landscape simply from wind blown accession from the oceans.
