Why is the ocean salty?
• Where does the salt come from? • Is all ocean water salty? • Which ocean/s is/are the saltiest? • What affects how salty the ocean is? • Is the ocean becoming saltier? Why or why not? • Where would each ocean be least salty? Mission: Part I: Create a visual presentation of your findings! (i.e. pie charts illustrating the chemical composition of the ocean or oceans, line graphs of the three major oceans showing seasonal salinity readings or a comparison of the salinity of each of the oceans to one another) After all, Earth really has only one ocean. Oceanographers have broken it down into three major divisions: Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian. Why have they done this? What purpose does this division serve? (Some sources of information refer to four oceans. Oceanographers, however, consider there to be only three.) Here are some sites that might help you: NOAA National oceanographic Data Center (NODC) http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/General/salinity.html **Note: You can produce your graphs usin
When Earth was still young, its atmosphere contained a nasty mix of hydrogen chloride, hydrogen bromide, and other noxious emissions from volcanoes. Some of these gases dissolved in the primitive ocean, making it salty, oceanographers believe. Today, however, most of the salt in the oceans comes from the continual rinsing of the earth. Rain falling on the land dissolves the salts in eroding rocks, and these salts are carried down the rivers and out to sea. The salts accumulate in the ocean as water evaporates to form clouds. The oceans are getting saltier every day, but the rate of increase is so slow that it is virtually immeasurable. Ocean water is currently about 3.5 percent salt. If the oceans dried up, enough salt would be left behind to build a 180-mile-tall, one- mile-thick wall around the equator. More than 90 percent of that salt would be sodium chloride, or ordinary table salt.
