what causes ocean water to be salty?
A pinch of salt will dissolve and disappear in a glass of water. The salty chemicals of the ocean are also dissolved in water. If we could separate them from the sea, we would have enough powdery chemicals t0 cover all the earth’s dry land with a layer 400 feet deep. And every year the salty sea is becoming saltier. A cubic yard of sea water contains about 60 pounds of disso1ved chemicals. This is enough water to fi11 a tank one yard wide, one yard deep and one yard high. A cubic mile of sea water contains 166 million tons of salty chemicals, and it is estimated that the dissolved chemicals in the entire ocean weigh about 50 quadrillion tons. Yet, in the distant past, the oceans of the earth were filled with fresh water, or, at any rate, with water as fresh as that in our rivers. Year by year, the sea has stolen its store of dissolved chemicals from the dry land, and it is estimated that this robbery story has been going on for at least 400 million years. The sea, you would think, must
