Why is there salt in oceans, and not rivers?

Answer 1

*Why is the ocean salty?
It is salty because it has a lot of salt in it! Salt is a mineral that is found in soil and rocks, too. Flowing water picks up some salt and carries it to rivers. Rivers carry it to seas. Since this has been happening for millions of years, the oceans now have a lot of salt—about one cup per gallon!
*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.

Answer 2

There is some salt, but not much (trace amounts normally) in rivers. The salts are usually picked up from ground sources and carried down stream.

The water feeding rivers is primarily fresh due to desalinization. The sun evaporates the water (primarily ocean water), but leaves the salts behind. The water vapor condenses and falls as precipitation. The precipitation falls pretty much everywhere, on the land and sea. The water landing on the ground has to go somewhere and is usually forced into lakes and rivers.

Answer 3

There is salt in rivers and other minerals also. but the concentration is not very high because river water is from rain, glacier or spring. when rivers flow they bring everything they pick-up along the way and eventually flow into an ocean. so with all the rivers feeding water,salt and other things into the ocean for millions of years plus the natural water cycle ( ocean water evaporates into clouds, clouds turn into rain , rain into rivers) you end up with a high concentration of salt cause salt does not evaporate.

Answer 4

sparkling water oftentimes mixes with sea water in the tidal zone of a river or stream. Rivers with very intense flows such as a results of fact the Amazon would wash freshwater far out into the sea.

Answer 5

thats a question for God