Why is the sea salty?

Answer 1

Because sodium and cholride are the most abundant elements in water.

Answer 2

There are some excellent answers. Of course the seas are not uniformly salty. The Mediterranean Sea concentrates salt and the ocean is almost fresh water at the surface for a hundred miles out to sea from the discharge of the Amazon River. The Great Lakes are fresh water. Every merchant ship that plies the seas must include on the hull a Plimsoll Mark and a deck line to be sure the ship is not over-laded based on the details of the voyage and cargo. An improperly laded ship might sink if it reaches warm or less salty waters with less buoyancy. Typical weather (wave height) in season is also important.

Answer 3

Everyone who has been to the beach knows that seawater is salty. Everyone also knows that fresh water in rain, rivers, and even ice is not salty. Why are some of Earth’s waters salty and others not? There are two clues that give us the answer. First, “fresh” water is not entirely free of dissolved salt. Even rainwater has traces of substances dissolved in it that were picked up during passage through the atmosphere. Much of this material that “washes out” of the atmosphere today is pollution, but there are also natural substances present.

As rainwater passes through soil and percolates through rocks, it dissolves some of the minerals, a process called weathering. This is the water we drink, and of course, we cannot taste the salt because its concentration is too low. Eventually, this water with its small load of dissolved minerals or salts reaches a stream and flows into lakes and the ocean. The annual addition of dissolved salts by rivers is only a tiny fraction of the total salt in the ocean. The dissolved salts carried by all the world’s rivers would equal the salt in the ocean in about 200 to 300 million years.

A second clue to how the sea became salty is the presence of salt lakes such as the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea. Both are about 10 times saltier than seawater. Why are these lakes salty while most of the world’s lakes are not? Lakes are temporary storage areas for water. Rivers and streams bring water to the lakes, and other rivers carry water out of lakes. Thus, lakes are really only wide depressions in a river channel that have filled with water. Water flows in one end and out the other.

The Great Salt Lake, Dead Sea, and other salt lakes have no outlets. All the water that flows into these lakes escapes only by evaporation. When water evaporates, the dissolved salts are left behind. So a few lakes are salty because rivers carried salts to the lakes, the water in the lakes evaporated and the salts were left behind. After years and years of river inflow and evaporation, the salt content of the lake water built up to the present levels. The same process made the seas salty. Rivers carry dissolved salts to the ocean. 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.

Rivers are not the only source of dissolved salts. About twenty years ago, features on the crest of oceanic ridges were discovered that modified our view on how the sea became salty. These features, known as hydrothermal vents, represent places on the ocean floor where sea water that has seeped into the rocks of the oceanic crust, has become hotter, and has dissolved some of the minerals from the crust, now flows back into the ocean. With the hot water comes a large complement of dissolved minerals. Estimates of the amount of hydrothermal fluids now flowing from these vents indicate that the entire volume of the oceans could seep through the oceanic crust in about 10 million years. Thus, this process has a very important effect on salinity. The reactions between seawater and oceanic basalt, the rock of ocean crust, are not one-way, however; some of the dissolved salts react with the rock and are removed from the water.

A final process that provides salts to the oceans is submarine volcanism, the eruption of volcanoes under water. This is similar to the previous process in that seawater is reacting with hot rock and dissolving some of the mineral constituents.

Will the oceans continue to become saltier? Not likely. In fact the sea has had about the same salt content for many hundred of millions if not billions of years. The salt content has reached a steady state. Dissolved salts are being removed from seawater to form new minerals at the bottom of the ocean as fast as rivers and hydrothermal processes are providing new salts.

We can summarize this discussion. Wherever water comes into contact with the rocks of Earth’s crust, either on land or in the ocean or within the oceanic crust, some of the minerals in the rock dissolve and are carried by the water to the ocean. The salt content of seawater does not change because new minerals are forming on the sea floor at the same rate as salt is added. Thus, the salt content of the sea is at steady state.

Answer 4

Drink some water that has had fish swimming in it for a week or two, that may yaste salty as well.

Answer 5

as per hindu mythology rishi Agust drank the whole sea but when gods requested him for mankind rishi Agust dischared drunk ocean in form of urine. that is why sea water is still salty.
another thing , the ocean never spends its water and is known as miser, so sea water is salty. bcz sea always takes waters from rivers but never gives it to any one; though the sun extracts its water by vaporating forcibly.

Answer 6

The oceans get most of their salt from rivers, but some salt also comes from volcanic gases and hot fluids released from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. Rivers contain an average of about 0.120 g/kg of salts and deliver about 3 billion metric tons of salts to the ocean each year. As water continuously cycled between the oceans, the atmosphere, and the land (see Hydrologic Cycle) over hundreds of millions of years, the salts from rivers remained in the oceans, which explains why seawater is saltier than river water.

However, ancient salt deposits indicate that the average ocean salinity has remained roughly constant for at least 1.5 billion years. Ocean salinity is held nearly constant over geologic time by processes that remove salts from seawater at about the same rate at which they are supplied. Salts leave the ocean primarily when they bond chemically to clay sediments as they sink to the sea floor in a process called reverse weathering or adsorption. They are also removed when growing marine plants and animals incorporate them to form body parts, when enclosed seas evaporate to the point that salts precipitate out and form minerals, and when sea spray, blown from waves into the air, leaves a salty aerosol in the air or a salty film on nearby land.

Salts deposited on the seafloor can return to the oceans hundreds of millions of years later. For example, much of the picturesque landscape of the American Southwest is composed of uplifted ancient seafloors. The weathering of these rocks releases ancient sea salts that the Río Grande and the Colorado River carry back to the sea.

The different ions in the ocean reside, or remain, in ocean waters for different lengths of time, ranging from average values of 100 years for iron to 100 million years for chloride. These differences in residence times reflect the various rates at which they are added to and removed from the ocean. The rates at which different salts are added to the oceans depend mostly on the concentrations of the salts in river water, which can be different in proportion from those in seawater. The rates at which different salts are removed from seawater depend on the mechanism of removal. For example, magnesium and potassium are adsorbed readily by sediments sinking to the ocean floor, while calcium is rapidly absorbed by marine organisms to make shells.

I hope this helps.
Thanks!

Answer 7

Because if it were peppery, herring would taste funny.

Answer 8

cuz the cods r swimin there !

Answer 9

Sperm Whales LOL

Answer 10

because of all the salt... duh