Why is the ocean salty?

Everything Water

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by Mya Kagan (whyzz writer) >> more about the author

Pass the salt! – If you’ve ever been swimming at the beach and accidentally swallowed a mouthful of ocean water, then you already know ocean water can be pretty salty! Did it leave you wondering why??

The amount of salt in the oceans doesn’t ever change very much, but there are several things that contribute to how the salt got there. One reason the ocean is so salty is because when the Earth was formed thousands of years ago, gases from deep inside the Earth that contained salt were released when land and water came together. There was enough of this salt that some of it’s the same salt still in the ocean today!

The ocean is also salty from rainwater that falls onto rocks or land, picks up some salt in the earth, and then trickles down into the ocean! There are also some places in the ocean floor where salty gases and minerals from within the Earth get released into the ocean!

Evaporation… a water transformation!

If you live near enough to an ocean that you can get some ocean water and bring it home with you, then you can try out this experiment to see how much salt is actually in there!

All you need to do is collect a cup of salty ocean water. If you don’t live near an ocean, you can make your own salty water by just adding a few teaspoons of salt to a cup of tap water.

Leave the cup of salty water on a sunny windowsill for a few days until it evaporates and all of the water is gone.

What do you find in the bottom of the cup when all of the water is gone?

…Salt!