If we start filtering sea water to make drinking water, won't it make sea watet to salty for sea creatures?

Question

Just wondering because I know that they put the filtered salt back into ocean.

Answer 1

Actually the discharge of brine back into the sea has been shown to have very serious effects on the local sea life. The oceans have a balance that can be easily upset. The concentrated seawater has the potential to harm ecosystems, especially marine environments in regions with low turbidity and high evaporation that already have elevated salinity. The ecosystem cannot accommodate such an extreme change in salinity and many filter-feeding animals would be destroyed when the water is returned to the ocean. Because the brine is more dense than the surrounding sea water due to the higher solute concentration, discharge into water bodies means that the ecosystems on the bed of the water body are most at risk because the brine sinks and remains there long enough to damage the ecosystems. Careful re-introduction can minimize this problem.

Answer 2

Quite a few not so good answers posted to this one already. No you should not drink filtered sea water. Sea water has a large amount of dissolved salt in it (Sodium Chloride and others). A filter does not remove substances that are actually dissolved in the water. They only remove solid particles that are suspended in the water. You can filter out sand or even tiny single celled bacteria with a fine enough filter. But any filter that lets a water molecule through is going to let the suspended chlorine and sodium atoms through as well. Boiling the water would only make the salt content higher because pure water would evaporate and the salt would be left behind. Now if you can condense the water vapor back into water, like in a water still as suggested then you would have fresh, in fact completely mineral free, sterile, distilled water. This is why desalination plants are so energy intensive because it takes a lot of energy to evaporate the water.

Answer 3

You can't filter the salt out of seawater, it's a solution. You'd have to boil the water and then scoop the salt and put it back in the ocean. And at a certain point salt would stop dissolving in the ocean.
And good luck trying to kill sea creatures, they've been around and are very highly evolved. They can handle some salt.

Answer 4

Yes, somewhat, but the ocean is an awfully big place, so it can absorb that salt without the critters noticing too much.

I'm sure the immediately around the desal plant will be unpleasant for most things because of the heat and the salt. But beyond the immediate area, it's no big deal.

Answer 5

Not to any signif. There are places where ocean water forms salts. There is an equilibrium. Also the water that is used goes back to the ocean anyway after it goes through storm drains, sewers, or evaporation.

Answer 6

Mother Nature is already doing this;-} it's called rain.
We're not going to make much difference overall.
With every rainfall, the runoff dissolves more salts.
Fortunately, the sea creatures need this to survive.
We might actually keep the salts too.

Answer 7

Only in the area where the brine is dumped.
It would be nice if we could combine it with treated sewage effluent, solving that problem.

Answer 8

if we stsrt useing sea water to drink and then we would not have any wars over water.