Why is our Ocean so Salty?

You may know that the oceans cover about 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, and that about 97 percent of all water on and in the Earth is saline, there’s a lot of salty water on our planet. 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 meters) thick, about the height of a 40 story office building. But, where did all this salt come from? 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: 

  

  Rivers and surface runoff are not the only source of dissolved salts. Hydrothermal vents are recently discovered features on the crest of oceanic ridges that contribute dissolved minerals to the oceans. These vents are the exit point on the ocean floor from which seas water that has seeped into the rocks of the oceanic crust has become hotter, has dissolved some of the minerals from the crust, and then flows back into the ocean. With the hot water comes large amounts 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 seawater

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. 

- Renix L. Graham, III

"Water is the only drink for a wise man." - Henry David Thoreau

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