why is the ocean salty, and how did it get that way?
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Lick salty rock? Salt in mouth.
Ocean licks big rock? Salt in ocean.
Do it every day for thousands of years? Very salty ocean.
How did the big rock get salt? Well, how did the big rock get there? Depends on who you ask. You’re 5, go outside.
Water rains down then flows downstream towards the ocean. While it flows across the land it takes with it whatever it can. Salt and other minerals are in the ground and get swept away by the flowing water.
Now over millions of years the water kept getting evaporated in the ocean leaving all the minerals behind and falling as rain and flowing as a river taking new minerals to the ocean. So over time the minerals got more and more and more and now the ocean is salty
Really simply and kind of not correct – rocks have salt. Salt dissolves in water, water gets salty
Salt is just a type of rock. When rivers flow, they wear away at rocks. Some of those rocks are salt. The rivers flow into the ocean, dropping off all that salt. When the ocean evaporates to produce more rain over land, the water evaporates, but the salt stays behind. This is how the ocean and inland seas became salty
When a whale ejaculates, it bricks about 20L/5.2gallons at a time. Majority of this doesn’t stay in the intended receptacle…
– there’s water in the planet
– there’s salt
– salt dissolves in water, so it’ll end up in the seas
By contrast, rivers are not salty since they basically originate from rain/snow (salt obviously doesn’t evaporate).
Lots of people are focusing on the fact that fresh water picks up salt from the land. But I think that’s missing the point and has it backward.
The oceans are absolutely massive and deep and contain the vast majority of liquid water on earth. The default state of water on earth is salty and it got that way mostly just by virtue of covering most of its surface and dissolving whatever is there.
The real question is why is water on land mostly NOT salty, and that’s where the other answers come in; water on land is fresh because rain isn’t salty and washes the salt into the ocean.
It is because of the emotional sharks, who wants to hug people but always misunderstood and constantly crying… Their tears make the ocean salty…
This is an excellent question and remarkably is one of the first questions that caused prior to question whether the world had always existed or if it had a finite age.
Consider:
Either the ocean had always been salty, or it has accrued the salt. These are the only options.
If it were always salty, then why is it not becoming less salty as all the freshwater rivers flow into it? If it accrued the salt, then it it must have been fresh at once point in time and continued to get saltier. These are the only 2 options. And both logically lead to the conclusion that there must be something maintaining the salt levels, otherwise we’d either have only fresh water oceans, or oceans of just plain salt.
Neither of those outcomes exist. Ergo, Earth’s existence in the past is finite, and it hasn’t existed forever.
Rock is a little salty. Water rains on rock, gets just a little salty. Little bit salty water runs downhill to ocean. Ocean water evaporates, leaving salty. Ocean over time get more salty.
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