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--------------------------------- 2374 - OCEANS - why is it salt waster?
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Why is the ocean salt water? It all starts with H2O, water is two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. Electro magnetically each molecule is perfectly balanced, it is neutral, there is no magnetic or electric charge, but not quite. Water is unbalanced.
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- The two hydrogen atoms cling to the Oxygen atom like Mickey Mouse ears. Water is slightly polarized. That is why it picks up stuff. Why you can wash your hands it. Why it dissolves stuff. And, why it collects minerals and salts to become salt water.
- When water evaporates from the ocean it is perfectly pure, i.e. Distilled water. But it starts collecting stuff in the atmosphere right away. It clings to dust, meteorites, comet dust, star dust, solar wind dust, whatever comes into our atmosphere from outer space.
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- Eventually it gets heavy enough and falls out of the sky as rain. As it seeps though the soil and rocks it picks up more minerals. The water you drink is already “salty” but the concentration is low and you call it freshwater because you can not taste it. We sometimes refer to this as the “hardness” of the water. This freshwater enters the oceans in rivers and streams that is already partly “salty“.
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- Minerals enter the ocean water from the ocean floor as well. Cracks and hydrothermal vents gorge chemical soup into the ocean waters. Undersea volcanoes add minerals, the winds deposit particles on the ocean surface. If you could spread all these minerals from the oceans onto the land it would form a layer 500 feet thick everywhere.
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- These minerals are mostly sodium chloride, common table salt. That is why it tastes salty. The Ocean is:
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----------------------------------------- 55% chloride,
----------------------------------------- 30.6% sodium,
----------------------------------------- 7.7% sulfate,
----------------------------------------- 3.7% magnesium,
----------------------------------------- 1.2% calcium,
----------------------------------------- 1.1% potassium,
----------------------------------------- 0.4% bicarbonate,
----------------------------------------- 0.2% bromide,
----------------------------------------- and some borate, strontium, and fluoride.
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- If pure water keeps evaporating from the ocean why does the ocean not keep getting saltier and saltier? It stays balanced at 35 parts salt to 1000 parts water.
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- What is taking salt out of the water? Animals are using the salt. Coral polyps, mollusks crustaceans are making there bodies out of the ocean minerals found in the water. Algae diatoms extract silica. Bacteria eat organic material. Organisms die and settle their minerals to the ocean floor. Minerals even bind to rocks and rocks can grow.
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- However, in some locations the ocean waters can get out of balance and does become saltier. The Dead Sea is the lowest dry spot on the planet and there is nowhere for water to escape. The salt content can grow by a factor of 10 times normal reaching 30% salt content. The water density in the Dead Sea can increase so much you can float in the water on you back and read a newspaper.
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- Ocean water also maintains a pH balance ranging from 7.4 to 8.3. 7 is neutral. So it is slightly alkaline. About the same as your blood which is 7.4.
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- A big concern is that the pollution of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is making the ocean more acidic, creating carbonic acid. The ocean actually helps accelerate this process by removing pollution from the atmosphere. Particles that are too small to fall out as rain over land encounter sea-salt aerosols over the oceans and form droplets that do fall out as rain over the ocean.
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- If you poured 2 bottles of wine into the ocean, waited 20 years for the wine to mix thoroughly with the ocean waters around the world, then refilled the bottles with ocean water. What are the odds that the bottles contain at least one of the original wine molecules? I would not do this because it is a waste of good wine. However, this is thought experiment:
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- The answer an almost 100% certainty. It works out in the math. The odds of picking a wine molecule for the ocean are 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That is the ratio of 1.5 liters to the volume of water in the oceans.
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- However, two bottles of water hold 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules. That in effect is 10^25 attempts of picking out one wine molecule. With that many attempts you are almost certain to get at least one wine molecule.
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- The same mathematical statistics calculate that every breath you take contains at least one air molecule that you have breathed once before, guaranteed.
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- May 21, 2019. 666
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--------------------- Tuesday, May 21, 2019 -------------------------
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