h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

why is the sea salty? And why does it make you go mad if you drink it. From Alex Egg.

Does it make you go mad? I thought it just dehydrated the living arse out of shipwrecked sailors that drunk it that subsequently led to knackering of the kidneys, liver, endocrine system and eventually the brain and thus to madness in thought and deed. Modern seawater has lots of added ingredients that probably exacerbate this.
Don't know why it's salty. Maybe the secretions of algae, maybe the nature of the oceanic plates above which seas lie. Maybe they've never been pure water - maybe they're left over from all that primordial soup business that used to be around and have been slowly reduced to almost-water with a few solutes over the billions of years since life began in them.

Check out this link. It was found by going onto the AltaVista search engine and typing "why is the sea salty?" into the search box!

http://www.thenaturalworld.com/tidepool/salty/index.html

It is salty because it contains sodium chloride

sorry

perhaps it comes from the rocks or something. And as for why it sends you mad - doesn't the fact that it is disgusting and makes you die of unquenchable thirst qualify?

ah yes, but it the effect psychological, physiological, or simply unlogical?

mike

an inbalance of sodium in the body could help create irregular nerve impulses, thus leading to untold nutsiness in the old noggin'...

I think that seawater is roughly as saline as the fluid in our bodies, and we evolved from the sea, so it's been like that for a long time..... as to how it got there, well sodium salts dissolve in water like, er... NaCl in H2O. This doesn't really help, but I feel it needed saying.

Actually the fact that salt dissolves in water is why the sea is salty, rain is pulled out of the ocean as fresh water, then dropped on land. The ground contains lots of natural salts and minerals, and most water passes over the earth sucking these up and returns to the ocean (which is usually the lowest point to flow to) the water is evaporated back out again (sans salt) and returns to collect more... it makes you wonder if eventually the entire ocean will be one giant supersaturated sludge.

There are things that remove salt from seawater as well as adding it. Biological things, if I remember rightly. Millions of years ago, apparently, the sea was a lot saltier. Today it has reached some sort of equilibrium, with salt extraction balancing out the addition due to rainfall.

Sea water has increased in salinity (Na concentration). See the link from StevenR above.

It's so that you don't have to put salt on your fish when you have fish and chips!!

That was my worthwhile contribution to this conversation.

thanks for that! more likely its because all the dinasaurs dissolved into the seas when they died and everyone knows that dinasaurs were made of salt.....which is in turn why they were made extinct.....

it's all one of those amazing vicious circles.

If that's the case then why aren't lakes salty too?

Maybe the dinosaurs didn't get that far - they weren't deep enough to bath in or something

Buut mybe the just liked the whole 'going to the beach' thing...and so they were there when they died.

Or maybe they had a lot of burials at sea?!?

Some lakes are salty - the Dead Sea springs to mind, & there are some famous ex lakes that are currently waiting for a decent rainstorm to restore their water levels - like Lake Eyre in Oz & various salt lakes in America renowned for land speed record attempts - but their name escapes me now. There may also be/have been one near the home of Osmondness in Salt Lake City.


;^)#

"Various" salt lakes in the States?!? I know of only one.. Yes, the one near 'Osmondness'

Well Im assuming that the US has some that are similar to those in Australia - when it rains a lot they're lakes, when it doesn't )ie most of the time) they're salt flats. Here in Oz we still call 'em lakes even when they're dry.


;^)#

Which is kinda dumb - like calling a fly with no wings a 'walk'.

Nah - its just so we can laugh at the tourists when they go down to the 'lake' for a swim.

;^)#