Why the sea is salty?
The answer is actually really simple :)…Salt in the ocean comes from rocks on land. Here’s how it works: The rain that falls on the land contains some dissolved carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. This causes the rainwater to be slightly acidic due to carbonic acid (which forms from carbon dioxide and water). The rain erodes the rock and the acid breaks down the rocks and carries it along in a dissolved state as ions. The ions in the runoff are carried to the streams and rivers to the ocean. Many of the dissolved ions are used by organisms in the ocean and are removed from the water. Others are not used up and are left for long periods of time where their concentrations increase over time. The two ions that are present most often in seawater are are chloride and sodium. These two make up over 90% of all dissolved ions in seawater. By the way, the concentration of salt in seawater (salinity) is about 35 parts per thousand. In other words, about 35 of 1,000 (3.5%) of the weight of
Salt is carried into the oceans by rivers. The amount of salt being taken out of the sea is much less than is entering the sea. See this article for a good summary. Some quotes from it below. The fact that the sea is not more salty is good evidence that the sea is not billions of years old, as evolutionists would have us believe. It is good evidence in support of the creationists model of origins and against the evolutionary model. http://creationontheweb.com/content/view… Austin and Humphreys calculated that about 457 million tonnes of sodium now comes into the sea every year. The minimum possible rate in the past, even if the most generous assumptions are granted to evolutionists, is 356 million tonnes/year. However, the rate of all of this sodium output is far less than the input. Austin and Humphreys calculated that about 122 million tonnes of sodium leaves the sea every year. The maximum possible rate in the
As the rains fall and water flows over the land, the water dissolves salt out of the rocks, washes the salt into streams, then rivers, and finally carries the salt to the sea. The salt stays in the sea because no water flows out of the sea just as no water flows out of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. When seawater evaporates to form clouds, almost all of the salt stays behind.
