Why aren’t rivers/estuaries/lakes etc salty like the sea ?
In: Planetary Science
When water form into clouds, they don’t take the salt with it. Then it rains on land, that water makes its way into rivers, and eventually into the ocean (or evaporated out of an inland lake again). If it runs through/over salt it will dissolve it and take it on the journey.
So no matter where the salt starts, it’s perpetually washing downstream to a lake bed or—more often—the ocean. Once salt gets there, there’s no mechanism to move the salt anywhere else. Do that for billions of years, and you get salty oceans and fresh rivers.
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