About why the ocean is salty…here goes

Long long ago in China (that basically means don’t ask how long ago) there lived two brothers -Mao and Xao.

Mao was the good guy… the poor one who gave his meal to a beggar and went to sleep having water. (Background: Such story characters live in eternal hope that one day everything will be fine and the fairy goddess will grant a magic wish.)

Xao was… you guessed… the bad one. (Background: Bad guys steal, lie, and trouble the good guys.)

Now Mao, as destined, got lucky one day and helped a goblin. The happy goblin granted a wish and my clever man asked for a grinding stone that churns out food.

The twist was that this stone had its working. You demanded the food you wanted and when you had enough you turned it left to stop.

So Mao thought he could live happily ever after but that wasn’t to be. The evil brother discovered the stone and stole it. Xao escaped on a boat and when he felt hungry, picked a rice cake from his pocket. He asked the grinding stone for some salt to taste and out came a fountain. Now, Xao missed the part how to make it stop! Not his fault. Its not like goblin wishes come with instruction manuals.

So the boat filled up with salt and sank. Xao escaped and took his sorry story to his brother who forgave him and they decided to find more goblins together.

The grinding stone, meanwhile, is still in the bottom of the ocean cooking up all the salt

And you thought it was some chemical-biological thingy!

————-

P.S. If Xao had no rice cakes and had asked the grinding stone for it, would our oceans would be filled with rice?

————-

Seriously…

Long long ago when the earth was young, the ocean water wasn’t so salty.
But as time progressed the rain water ran over the land breaking up rocks and transporting their minerals to he seas, the ocean has become saltier. ut just these accumulations of dissolved and suspended solids o not explian completly why the ocean is salty.

Salts become concentrated in the sea because the Sun’s heat distills or vaporizes almost pure water from the surface of the sea and leaves the salts behind. The ocean, then, is not fresh like river water because of the huge accumulation of salts by evaporation and the contribution of raw salts from the land. In fact, since the first rainfall, the seas have become saltier.

Add to that, the salinity of ocean water varies. It is affected by such factors as melting of ice, inflow of river water, evaporation, rain, snowfall, wind, wave motion, and ocean currents that cause horizontal and vertical mixing of the saltwater.

The saltiest water (40 o/oo) [i.e. 40 pounds of salt per 1,000 pounds of sea water] occurs in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, where rates of evaporation are very high. Of the major oceans, the North Atlantic is the saltiest; its salinity averages about 37.9 o/oo. Within the North Atlantic, the saltiest part is the Sargasso Sea, an area of about 2 million square miles, located about 2,000 miles west of the Canary Islands. The Sargasso Sea is set apart from the open ocean by floating brown seaweed “sargassum” from which the sea gets its name. The saltiness of this sea is due in part to the high water temperature (up to 83º F) causing a high rate of evaporation and in part to its remoteness from land; because it is so far from land, it receives no fresh-water inflow.

Did you know: If the salt in the sea could be removed and spread evenly over the Earth’s land surface it would form a layer more than 500 feet thick, about the height of a 40-story office building!