where does sea salt come from exactly?

Question

i know its from the sea, but where? like, under it? or floating in it? or on top? id like to know. and how do we get to it to mine it?

Answer 1

You take some seawater, filter it, and the boil it until the water all goes into vapor form. The crusty white solution at the bottom of the pot is salt.

Alternatively, you could let sea salt evaporate, and collect the resulting crusty salt.

If you don't want to eat the salt, then get some nail polish remover (acetone) and shake it in a jar with salt water. Salt is insoluble in acetone and will precipiate out of solution.

Answer 2

Why is the Ocean Salty?
If you get into folk stories and mythology you will see that almost every culture has a story explaining how the oceans became salty. The answer is really very simple. Salt in the ocean comes from rocks on land. Here's how it works:

The rain that falls on the land contains some dissolved carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. This causes the rainwater to be slightly acidic due to carbonic acid (which forms from carbon dioxide and water). The rain erodes the rock and the acid breaks down the rocks and carries it along in a dissolved state as ions. The ions in the runoff are carried to the streams and rivers to the ocean. Many of the dissolved ions are used by organisms in the ocean and are removed from the water. Others are not used up and are left for long periods of time where their concentrations increase over time.

The two ions that are present most often in seawater are are chloride and sodium. These two make up over 90% of all dissolved ions in seawater. By the way, the concentration of salt in seawater (salinity) is about 35 parts per thousand. In other words, about 35 of 1,000 (3.5%) of the weight of seawater comes from the dissolved salts; in a cubic mile of seawater the weight of the salt, as sodium chloride, would be about 120 million tons. And, just so you don't think seawater is worthless, a cubic mile of it also can contain up to 25 tons of gold and up to 45 tons of silver! Before you go out and try alchemy on seawater, though, just think about how big a cubic mile is.

By some estimates, if the salt in the ocean could be removed and spread evenly over the Earth’s land surface it would form a layer more than 500 feet (166 m) thick, about the height of a 40-story office building.

Information courtesy the of Argonne National Laboratory

Answer 3

Yes, some salts come from erosion of the land, but that is not the end of the story. Geoscientists believe that the majority of sea salts come from underwater vents called black smokers and white smokers. These vents take water from the sea to remove ions from mafic plutons. During the Paleozoic Era little limestone (CaCO3) but much dolostone (CaMg(CO3)2) was deposited because more magnesium was in ocean water. This magnesium didn't come from the continents, but from the white smokers.