See Also Ground Water can Also Have High Salt Content Are Salt Levels in Drinking Water a Health Concern? Salt Water Desalination Drinking Water Systems Can You Make Seawater Drinkable? Salt Content Levels -Sea vs Fresh Water

Is sea water the saltiest water found on earth?

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. A simple experiment illustrates this.

Fill three glasses with water from the kitchen faucet. Drink from one and it tastes fresh even though some dissolved salts are naturally present. Add a pinch of table salt to the second, and the water may taste fresh or slightly salty depending on a personal taste threshold and on the amount of salt held in a "pinch." But add a teaspoon of salt to the third and your taste buds vehemently protest that this water is too salty to drink; this glass of water has about the same salt content as a glass of sea water. Obviously, the ocean, in contrast to the water we use daily, contains unacceptable amounts of dissolved chemicals; it is too salty for human consumption.

Sea water has been defined as a weak solution of almost everything. Ocean 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 as 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.

The Mississippi, Amazon, and Yukon Rivers empty respectively into the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean, all of which are salty. Why aren't the oceans as fresh as the river waters that empty into them? Because the saltiness of the ocean is the result of several natural influences and processes, the salt load of the streams entering the ocean is just one of these factors.It is estimated that the rivers and streams flowing from the United States alone discharge 225 million tons of dissolved solids and 513 million tons of suspended sediment annually to the sea. Recent calculations show yields of dissolved solids from other land masses that range from about 6 tons per square mile for Australia to about 120 tons per square mile for Europe. Throughout the world, rivers carry an estimated 4 billion tons of dissolved salts to the ocean annually. About the same tonnage of salt from the ocean water probably is deposited as sediment on the ocean bottom, and thus, yearly gains may offset yearly losses. In other words, the oceans today probably have a balanced salt input and outgo.

The saltiest water (40 ‰ ) occurs in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, where rates of evaporation are very high. Of the major oceans, the North Atlantic is the saltiest; its salinity averages about 37.9 ‰. Within the North Atlantic, the saltiest part is the Sargasso Sea, an area of about 2 million square miles, located about 2,000 miles west of the Canary Islands. The Sargasso Sea is set apart from the open ocean by floating brown seaweed "sargassum" from which the sea gets its name. The saltiness of this sea is due in part to the high water temperature (up to 83º F) causing a high rate of evaporation and in part to its remoteness from land; because it is so far from land, it receives no fresh-water inflow. Low salinities occur in polar seas where the salt water is diluted by melting ice and continued precipitation.

Partly landlocked seas or coastal inlets that receive substantial runoff from precipitation falling on the land also may have low salinities. The Baltic Sea ranges in salinity from about 5 to 15 ‰. The salinity of the Black Sea is less than 20 ‰. Water of the Puget Sound in the Tacoma, Wash., area ranges in salt content from 21 to about 27 ‰. This area is drained by a number of fresh-water streams which discharge an average of about 4.1 billion gallons of water per day into Puget Sound. Salinity of sea water along the coastal areas of the conterminous United States varies with the month of the year as well as with geographic location. For example, the salinity of the ocean water off Miami Beach, FL., varies from about 34.8 ‰ in October to 36.4 ‰ in May and June, while diagonally across the country, off the coast of Astoria, Oregon, the salinity of sea water varies from 0.3 ‰ in April and May to 2.6 ‰ in October. The water off the coast of Miami Beach has a high salt content because it is undiluted sea water. Off the coast of Astoria, however, the sea water is less saline because it is mixed with the fresh water of the mighty Columbia.

Sea water not only is much saltier than river water but it also differs in the proportion of the various salts. Sodium and chloride constitute 85 percent of the dissolved solids in sea water and account for the characteristic salty taste. Certain constituents in sea water, such as calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate, and silica, are partly taken out of solution by biological organisms, chemical precipitation, or physical-chemical reactions. In open water the chemical composition of sea water is nearly constant. Because of the stable ratios of the principal constituents to total salt content, the determination of one major constituent can be used to calculate sea water salinity. For minor constituents and dissolved gases the composition is variable and therefore ratios cannot be used to calculate salt Circulation and mixing, density and ocean currents, wind action, water temperature, solubility, and biochemical reactions are some of the factors that explain why the composition of water in the open sea is almost constant from place to place.

Read Next: Ground Water can Also Have High Salt Content

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