why is the sea salty?
463917
Tons & tons of dissolved minerals washed into the sea.
115310
Why is the sea supposed to be on fire? You might want to add some detail.\nAnd besides seawater is not purely H20. There is Sodium Chloride, which makes the sea water salty. Plus there is plenty of mineral, garbage, fecis,etc. which makes the composition of sea water to be very complex.
28439
The mineral content of the Dead Sea is significantly different from that of ocean water, consisting of approximately 53% magnesium chloride, 37% potassium chloride and 8% sodium chloride (table salt) with the remainder comprised of various trace elements.\n\nThe concentration of SO4 ions is very low, and the bromine ions concentration is the highest of all waters on Earth. Chlorides neutralize most of the calcium ions in the Dead Sea and its surroundings. While in other seas NaCl is 97%, in the Dead Sea the quantity of the NaCl is only 12-18 percent. The water temperature goes from 19 °C in February to 31 °C in August.\n\nThe water of the Dead Sea contains 21 minerals including magnesium, calcium, bromine and potassium. Twelve of these are found in no other sea or ocean, and some are recognized for imparting a relaxed feeling, nourishing the skin, activating the circulatory system and for easing rheumatic discomfort and metabolic disorders. Comparison between the chemical composition of the Dead Sea to other lakes and oceans show that the salt's concentration in the Dead Sea is 31.5% (the salinity fluctuates somewhat). Because of its unusually high concentration of salt, anyone can float in the Dead Sea easily because of natural buoyancy. In this the Dead Sea is similar to the Great Salt Lake in Utah, in the United States.
670488
Salt in the ocean comes from the land. The elements that make up salts, such as chlorine and sodium, started out in rocks. Water and acids eroded the rocks, and rivers carried the elements into the sea. The oceans usually contain 35 parts of salts for every 1000 parts of sea water. This is lower in some places where there is a lot of fresh water coming into the ocean. It is higher where the Sun is very strong and evaporates more of the water. When all the water is gone, the salts are left behind as solid, white crystals.\n\nThe right amount of salt is a very important part of our diet. In ancient times, salt was worth its weight in gold. People used it to flavor and preserve their food. Without salt, the food would spoil. For this reason, salt became a symbol of purity. Some sacrifices in the Old Testament included salt (Leviticus 2:13; Ezekiel 43:24). Jesus called faithful people "the salt of the earth," and the apostle Paul said that our speech should be "seasoned with salt"
826959
The basic answer to that is:\nAs water falls on land and runs into the oceans it picks up minerals.\nWhen it gets to the ocean the minerals get mixed into the ocean water.\nSunlight causes the water to evaporate but leaves the minerals behind.\nThe water then falls on land again repeating the process.\nEventually the salt content in the oceans built up to where it is today. And continues to build up.
467205
most people believe the seas are as much as 500 million years old because animals that lived then occur as fossils in rocks which once were under ancient seas. There are several theories about the origin of the seas, but no single theory explains all aspects of this puzzle. Many earth scientists agree with the hypothesis that both the atmosphere and the oceans have accumulated gradually through geologic time from some process of "degassing" of the Earth's interior. According to this theory, the ocean had its origin from the prolonged escape of water vapor and other gases from the molten igneous rocks of the Earth to the clouds surrounding the cooling Earth. After the Earth's surface had cooled to a temperature below the boiling point of water, rain began to fall and continued to fall for centuries. As the water drained into the great hollows in the Earth's surface, the primeval ocean came into existence. The forces of gravity prevented the water from leaving the planet.\n       All water, even rain water, contains dissolved chemicals which scientists call "salts." But not all water tastes salty. Water is fresh or salty according to individual judgment, and in making this decision man is more convinced by his sense of taste than by a laboratory test. It is one's taste buds that accept one water and reject another.\nOcean water is indeed a complex solution of mineral salts and of decayed biologic matter that results from the teeming life in the seas. Most of the ocean's salts were derived from gradual processes such the breaking up of the cooled igneous rocks of the Earth's crust by weathering and erosion, the wearing down of mountains, and the dissolving action of rains and streams which transported their mineral washings to the sea. Some of the ocean's salts have been dissolved from rocks and sediments below its floor. Other sources of salts include the solid and gaseous materials that escaped from the Earth's crust through volcanic vents or that originated in the atmosphere.
519909
It's a combination of less sunlight & density currents.\n\nCold salty water is very dense. It sinks. This along w/ surface flow created by winds creates currents in the sea.\n\nCold water ends up on the bottom.\n\nThe amount of geothermal energy located on the ocean floor is negligible here. It only makes a difference on a local scale. The ocean floor is very deep and very large. Too much space for geothermal vents to heat.
143304
Salt water is more corrosive, if that's what you're looking for.
296283
Oceans and seas are salt water,but the most salt water on earth could be found in the dead sea in Jordan in the Middle East.
886938
Ocean water has more dissolved solids in it, mostly salt. Great Salt Lake in Utah is even saltier than the ocean and a person can float on it like s/he was on a raft. Don't make the mistake of rubbing your eyes though, because it stings like hell!
224956
For any kind of electrochemistry to occur, there should be electrolytes present in the fluid to transfer charges.  This is why salt water is more corrosive.
798090
It's because salt is an electrolyte, a substance containing ions (charged atoms or molecules). The charges are what allow the atoms to conduct electricity, I think.
290700
(m)\n\nEveryone who has been to the beach knows that seawater is salty. Everyone also knows that fresh water in rain, rivers, and even ice is not salty. Why are some of Earth’s waters salty and others not? There are two clues that give us the answer. First, “fresh” water is not entirely free of dissolved salt. Even rainwater has traces of substances dissolved in it that were picked up during passage through the atmosphere. Much of this material that “washes out” of the atmosphere today is pollution, but there are also natural substances present.\n\nAs 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.\n\nA 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. \n\nThe 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. \n\nRivers 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.\n\nA 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.\n\nWill 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 proce
609639
seafood is salty... salt dehydrates you, therefore you get thirsty
17806
It should be noted that you are salty. We have a natural salinity that is important to maintaining homeostasis. Any disruption of our salinity can cause serious metabolic and physiologic problems.
64688
How salty the ocean is, however, defies ordinary comprehension. Some scientists estimate that the oceans contain as much as 50 quadrillion tons (50 million billion tons) of dissolved solids.\nIf the salt in the sea could be removed and spread evenly over the Earth's land surface it would form a layer more than 500 feet thick, about the height of a 40-story office building.
289316
They are often different due to the different water temperatures.  The total amount of dissolved salt in water decreases with temperature.