Why Is the Ocean Salty?

And is it getting saltier over time?

Growing up on an island, I’ve swallowed my fair share of seawater. And yuck, is it salty! When I later learned that urine is also salty, I became horrified and started looking at the bathing tourists with suspicion. Are they the source of that briny taste?

But since seawater made me gag enough already, I didn’t want to further inquire, lest my suspicion be confirmed. Eventually, however, my curiosity won out and I looked it up. Most online sources gave me this explanation:

But you know what? Although it sounds more sensible than my urine hypothesis, it’s just as wrong. Saying that the oceans are salty because of what rivers dump into them is like saying rivers transporting orange juice could produce, over millions of years, an ocean of tomato soup. It can’t. Rivers and oceans have different ingredients — they are not the same type of soup.

In fact, if you actually compare the minerals found in oceans and rivers, it’s quite obvious you can’t obtain one from the other by merely dumping a crapload of river minerals into the sea:

It’s not that seawater just has a higher concentration of minerals, but that it has completely different proportions. As the two tall green bars above show, the salts in seawater come overwhelmingly from sodium (Na+) and chloride (Cl-), while those in river water, as indicated…

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