Ok, so why is the sea salty??? and rivers not????

Answer 1

I will try to explain it in the the most basic way.

The oceans are the source of all water on this planet, and they contain salt. The salt in the ocean is dissolved.

Water evaporates from the oceans due to our climate. Evaporation means that the water turns to vapor, or gas form, and enters the air. Salt remains behind. (An easy way to see this is to take a glass and mix in a teaspoon or so of salt. Make sure the salt dissolves completely, then let the glass sit uncovered. Eventually, the water will dissolve, and you will be left with a film of salt in the bottom of the glass.)

The evaporated water goes up into the clouds, which carry the water over land. When it rains or snows, the water returns to earth, but it returns without the salt.

The water runs out of mountains or off of plains, and enters the rivers, salt free. The rivers eventually lead back to the ocean, and the water becomes salty again, and the whole process repeats itself.

Answer 2

The rivers are salty, just not very. Here's the deal:

Rain falls and leaches salts out of the ground. The rainwater runs into rivers. The salt is in very low concentrations.

The rivers hit the sea. Now here's the problem. The water can get away - evaporation - but the salt can't. It's stuck. So the salt concentration in the sea rises and rises until...

Until what? The real question is, why isn't the sea more salty? This has been going on for 4.5 billion years. It ought to be one big massive salt bath.

Answer: life. Sea life regulates ocean chemistry. If salt concentration goes up ever so slightly, more crustaceans appear and fix the salt into their shells. They die, in their time, and take the salt to the bottom in neat little shell-shaped packages. The salinity stays constant.

That's homeostasis - a key to understanding global warming (as it happens). Read Al Gore or James Lovelock for more.

And then... millenia pass, tectonic plate movements happen, new mountain ranges are thrust out of the sea floor, and suddenly all those billions of shells (which have now become rock) are at the top of a mountain. On which the rain falls...

Answer 3

Rivers have a low content of salt also, but is so low that we almost cant feel it. As rainwater passes through soil and percolates through rocks, it dissolves some of the minerals, a process called weathering, this water form rivers, spring water and flow to the rivers. Then the rivers goes on and flow into oceans or lakes ( lakes also have an outlet so this water goes to another rivers)carrying with them this amount of salt, water evaporates from the oceans to fall again as rain and to feed the rivers, but the salts remain in the ocean. Because of the huge volume of the oceans, hundreds of millions of years of river input were required for the salt content to build to its present level. For example the Great SALT Lake is salty because, this lake doesn't have an outlet, it let the water of river comes and don't go, such thing happen also in the Dead Sea. Also, ocean floors have like little geyser or volcanoes, with extremely hot current of water that dissolve minerals and rock beneath the oceans floor, adding more salinity to it. The ocean will not become more salty either, because the minerals also are going out the ocean.
Have a nice day!

Answer 4

hi dear what a great scientific question .it is very good question.According to my piont of view that sea r really salty and river water also salty but as ur question we ignorethiere little amount of salty.we knoe that when rain fall then some of the ater also pass through the salty placesand it goe to the river and in the last fall in to sea.now y the sea water salty I ould like to say that there r many camical raection insea water as sea have many animals and much more little and big creature.one is this reason reason that there body salt also react with water.also there is a production of many chamicalreaction in b/w many asids and salt in seathat help in more salty.also there r many big mines of salt in the sea water so it is the reason that ea water is more salty and river not


wih best wishe

Answer 5

The seas were originally salt since the dawn of time...but rivers, containing fresh water from rain runoff flow INTO the seas, not the other way around. There are some rivers that are slightly salty at their mouths from mixing though.

Answer 6

The saltiness of the ocean is more understandable when compared with the salt content of a fresh-water lake. For example, when 1 cubic foot of sea water evaporates it yields about 2.2 pounds of salt, but 1 cubic foot of fresh water from Lake Michigan contains only one one-hundredth (0.01) of a pound of salt, or about one sixth of an ounce. Thus, sea water is 220 times saltier than the fresh lake water.

What arouses the scientist's curiosity is not so much why the ocean is salty, but why it isn't fresh like the rivers and streams that empty into it. Further, what is the origin of the sea and of its "salts"? And how does one explain ocean water's remarkably uniform chemical composition? To these and related questions, scientists seek answers with full awareness that little about the oceans is understood.

Answer 7

Dissolved minerals make the sea salty but are left behind when water evaporates to form clouds which deposit themselves on the land as rain hence the rivers fill with non-salty water

Answer 8

rocks in the sea bed are different to those in rivers or lakes. simple as that. the term for salty water is 'salinity' or something like that?
the previous answer was a bit over the top really!!

Answer 9

im not sure, but would hazzard a guess it has something to do with volcanoes at the bottom of oceans, and rivers being MAINLY
rain water..

By the Way the Thames is a RIVER, yet is Salty
(Up untill Hampton Court way..)

Answer 10

The ocean is salty because it contains salt.

If you ask me, I believe that all that salt and silt is brought by rivers from the mountains, and because rivers keep flowing, all the salt it just dumps into the ocean.