A tropical storm picks up seawater and gains strength. When it makes landfall the rain is freshwater. Where does all the salt go?

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A tropical storm picks up seawater and gains strength. When it makes landfall the rain is freshwater. Where does all the salt go?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

To follow up as others have said, the salt remains in the ocean, and it’s the reason the ocean is salty in the first place.

Think about the precipitation cycle but over billions of years. All fresh water has trace amounts of salt in it, parts per million kind of stuff. Flows into the ocean, evaporators leaving the salt behind, rains on land, picks up trace levels of salt on the land, flows into the ocean, evaporates leaving salty ocean behind, over and over and over.

Bodies of water that don’t flow into the ocean have that same effect, that’s how you get the dead sea and the great salt lake. Salt lake used to be much larger thousands of years ago, consider the Bonneville salt plains, that’s the effect of more evaporation than precipitation.

One of the problems with global warming is ice, which is fresh water, melting into the ocean and making the ocean less salty. That cause ocean currents to destabilize and exacerbate extreme changes in weather.

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