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@Ali Al-Mahdi I have no clue how to answer you. I guess first I would say the likelihood that the urine was Ramesses II is not so good. Any liquid would have long ago evaporated, that is why mummification is so successful there. For the dreams, that depends on you and your core beliefs, cultural influences and what exactly you ingested. But from my personal experience, those are just dreams with no deeper meaning. I could see them being unsettling and disturbing but I assure you any deeper meaning you could find in them would only be the influence’s that interact with your life. If truly prophetic they would have been less abstract. But, my psychologist friend, these things you already know. For if they were real it only shows a deeply cynical outlook on beliefs which are not your own and a deep seeded need to justify that which you believe in. I have no formal education, so please take no offense to my common sense approach to answering, thank you. But you should never ingest something you don’t know for certain what it is. You could have poisoned yourself!
I didn't realise plants lose 90% of the water they collect through transpiration - releasing water vapour back into the atmosphere. The more plants, the more water vapour recycled through transpiration into the atmosphere. The less plants, the less water vapour recycled in those areas, and instead largely running off into the oceans. So the more forests cut down, the dryer the atmosphere in those areas. A cause of desertification?
This is the biggest concern with the Amazon rainforest. The biggest reason that the Amazon IS a rainforest is because of transpiration. As we cut it down, there are less trees to transpire and thus leas rain in the rainforest. If deforestation goes too far, the Amazon will never be rebuilt to the way it was before. It is an ancient forest from a time when South America was in a better position geographically and the world was more conducive to humid environments. If the rainforest is lost, the Amazon would become a savannah and eventually a desert, just like the Sahara.
Now I'm wondering if Rare Oceans should be added to the Rare Earth and Rare Sun hypotheses. How common or uncommon is it likely to be for exoplanets to *maintain a stable and steady* salinity balancing act for billions of years? Clarification edit: pondering specifically about *how common stable vs unstable and highly variable water salinity levels are,* _not_ evolution ability in _stable_ hypersaine oceans ;)
Nah, probably not a good filter, life works fine in salt concentrations that range many orders of magnitude. Also, a lot of the salt sinks, like the formation of evaporite rocks are universal and works in many ranges of pressure and temperature.
@@hamstsorkxxor Just because it's not a _significant_ filter (IE, it doesn't filter out a large percentage of potential environments from the pool) doesn't mean it isn't _a_ filter in some sense. Even if 99% of Earthlike worlds manage to develop stable oceans, we still need to take into account the 1% that don't. Otherwise we can't develop an accurate prediction of how many civilizations may or may not be out there.
@@hamstsorkxxor The question isn't if life can exist and survive. The question is whether or not it can evolve far enough for a technological civilization which would be detectable at interstellar distances. That doesn't just require life to exist, but the thrive and develop in many different forms for a long period of time. The kind of life that exist in super salty water seem to be a lot more limited than what can exist in normal sea water. If a planet had super salty oceans for most of its existence, I wonder what effect that would have on any life that exists there. Maybe they'd never develop beyond micro-organisms.
3:48 Fun fact: The Baltic Sea actually gets less salty, as you get further away from the Skagerrak. That is because river water makes up a larger amount of the water there, compared to water from the North Sea (Atlantic).
@@nunpho Yes it's the same reason. But the difference is the video said the Baltic Sea is less saltier than the ocean, but Lukas said there are big differences WITHIN the Baltic Sea which is true. I find that quite interesting that the water within the same sea keeps separated.
I'm a Geologist specialising in ocean tectonics and meteorites (I know, not much overlap). But we actually don't fully understand the salinity problems. Salt is weird.
Water is really weird too, and as with almost anything it's just getting weirder the more we learn about it. You've chosen cool things to specialize in! I think little overlap can be a good thing, being able to get out of a bubble and do something else is both important and a great tool to help figure things out.
Hank's explanation of "sinks" being the main source of de-salinization confused me from my minor degree level knowledge of geology, and it's never something I learned in college. How would something like the salt flats left by evaporating seas impact even semi current salt levels? The Mediterranean is a great example, it re-filled so wouldn't almost all of its salt have been reintroduced to the global ocean? As far as I know, the oceans haven't been close to being saturated with salt for billions of years and we don't see it just randomly precipitating. We don't see ancient salt layers spread globally consistent with a saturated concentration. Soooo SHOULDN'T the salt levels be slowly increasing, especially over the scale of 10's of millions or even billions of years? Because most low lying large salt deposits do get inundated by the sea over millions of years. And we see plenty of news salts deposited on the surface over that time scale that the seas should have been saturated a billion years ago, at least from my super basic math and observations trying to study the geology of the Great Basin.
To me its pretty simple. God created it all. Just like when you look at computers, software, cars, bridges, skyscrapers, language, colors, beauty and love; the complexity of it all just doesn't seem possible with randomness. There is major mathematics in it all which we can't even begin to understand the full equations. Isaac Newton was right. "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Hank: Sometimes preschoolers ask some pretty great questions. Me: As a preschool teacher, I can vouch for that. However, as an Oregonian, preschoolers very seldom ask "Why is the sky blue?" Instead, they very sensibly ask, "Why do people always say the sky is blue?" Simple observation clearly shows them it's usually gray or white.
Take them to the desert or a mountaintop. Gotta get rid of all that pesky water vapor in your way. I hear that at the summit of Haleakala, the sky even has a bit of a violet tinge.
but thats cool actually. theyre seeing that they cant trust what random people say when their direct observation (so, their "research") says otherwise. So they come to someone they trust, you, to figure out what thats all about lol. so, wow, preschoolers are mini scientists :')
@@pvic6959 Another point for the mini scientist idea is how many kids, after learning speech, seem to spend a long time in the "What's that?" phase, only to transition to the "Why?" stage of interaction.
Ethane in Titan's methane seas plays a similar role to salt in the Earth's oceans. It seems like Ligeia Mare is like the Baltic (fresher) while Ontario Lacus is like the Dead Sea (ethane rich/'saltier') I talk about this, and Halley's age of the Earth idea, in my book "Exploring Planetary Climate" Note: Halley did not name the comet : he predicted its return. Others named it after him.
I was wondering about the role of plate tectonics but it wasn't directly mentioned here. My first thought was whether much crustal salt was recycled into the the mantle through subduction (it struck me as unlikely). But then I thought about all that Himalayan pink salt (and other big salt deposits/domes strewn about the world): surely all of that is evaporated salt water from ancient, now disappeared seas (think of the Tethis whose pink salt deposits can be dug out of the Himalayas). Tectonics must surely have SOMETHING to do with the long-term relative stability of ocean salinity...
I would assume that tectonics effects are less important because once the salt has precipitated out of the ocean its already out of the salinity equation. But tectonics can make that salt inaccessible to water sources like rivers and aquafirs and even submerge it into the mantle (subduction zones also remove water & therefor salt from the seas) where it will eventually get spat out of a volcano to become part of the surface "salt cycle". I have no way to quantify the amount of salt moved so I can't really judge how big of an impact it has other than tectonics being very slow.
Absolutely tectonics are the main drivers if only in part because without new rocks getting exposed to the water cycle there wouldn't be any salts to add to the ocean. Additionally there are limits for how quickly evaporite deposits can return to the ocean which means that there are large concentrations of evaporites and dense brine pools on the seafloor particularly within the Gulf of Mexico and Mediterranean though they are more broadly found elsewhere. These concentrated brine pools don't mix easily because of the sharp density differences but there is also a high rate of ocean sedimentation which buries evaporite deposits faster than they can get evaporated leading them to form the hydrocabon sinks which oil and natural gas can accumulate on geological timescales. And the Tethys wasn't just a mere sea but a vast ocean which like the Atlantic formed from the break up of Pangaea that means a lot of its salts got removed/relocated too when it closed.
Don't salts get also processed by the biomass ? Like clams or corals ? Don't they remove salt from the ocean, and deposit it on the floor of the ocean when they die ?
@@darkninja___ idk if that's what he meant, But shells and pearls take a lot more time to dissolve than to be produced. And I think there are other ways salt gets deposited at the bottom, But I might be wrong P.S.: processed can also mean it just gets turned into something else, no?
@@Kenionatus nacl makes the shell, where does the na sodium ion go ? Back into the ocean where it mixes with a disolved shell and dissolved back into the water right ?
@@sweis12 Good point. Never thought about it this way. I doubt it redisolves all the calcium carbonate, because why would we have limestone formations then, but the Na ions do need to go somewhere.
@@rkozakand Yup, the Great Lakes were completely filled with continental ice sheet during the glacial periods of the current ice age. There probably weren't large lakes there until the ice sheets carved them out a bit in the last few million years. The structural basin they're in was formed by the midcontinent rift of about 1200 million years ago though -- which is why there was a basin to carve out in the first place. It filled up with sedimentary rocks after the rifting stopped -- and only in the last few million years did enough of that rock get eroded away again.
All liquids have a saturation point. The saturation point will change depending on the mineral, the pressure, and the temperature. There is also the concept of supersaturation, but that's really just the saturation point at a much different pressure and temperature than we would normally encounter in nature.
@@ValeriePallaoro Nope. Doesn't work that way. Barring some minor differences due to the presence of other minerals, the Ksp (saturation constant) of salt in water is the same for all bodies of water, irrespective of geography, at the SAME TEMPERATURE AND PRESSURE.
4:53 when he screams “THIS PROBE…” I jumped out of shock and spilled my ice tea and broke the glass in the floor and as I was cleaning it I stepped on glass with bare feet which made me bleed all over the place for a little while. I finally cleaned it all , took me like 35 mins for that whole thing to go down starting when I heard Hank scream.
To be honest, I don't think you really answered why the oceans aren't orders of magnitudes saltier than they presently are. You explained well why certain parts of the oceans are presently saltier than other parts. A sea getting cut off every once in a while and drying up removes very little of the ocean's volume, so very little of the salt. Not nearly enough to remove enough salt to match your estimate that it accumulates as much salt as it presently has in 50-150 million years from rivers.
What was barely touched is the fact that salts have a maximum saturation in water of a given temperature and pressure. You can see this with a simple kitchen experiment. Put some water in a glass, and slowly stir in table salt until the salt you are adding seems to not dissolve, but instead falls to the bottom of the glass. - This has to be a mechanism in the oceans as well, which helps explain the thick layers of salts in salt mines. The salt layer being mined under Michigan can be as thick as 400+ feet (121+ meters) which cannot be explained only by evaporation of a trapped body of water unless that body of water was over 12,000 meters (around 7.5 MILES) deep when it was isolated. *Used the following from a post above by Eroraf86 "As Hank said, 1 kg of seawater has about 40 g of salt. Salt is about twice as dense as water, so evaporating a 1 m column of water would leave about 2 cm of salt."
Yes there are the key point to remember is that salinity varies locally and thus like Earth's atmosphere isn't saturated everywhere the ocean isn't either plus there are processes which can remove salts below their individual saturation and precipitation levels too. And more importantly once salt deposits form it takes a long time for them to re-dissolve especially given the higher density brines that result don't mix easily with the overlying ocean.
3:37 that Arctic circle thing, y'know? Yeah, that goes through northern Sweden, Finland, Norway and Russia as well There's quite a bit of those countries above the Arctic circle *ackchually*
I was JUST wondering this exact thing yesterday, whether the sea is as salty as it will get, as it can get, or if it is getting saltier as more rainwater dissolves salts on land
this is the only educational show that I still watch on youtube been watching you guys since I was like 14 in high school but you guys always manage to keep it interesting and keep up with what's going on in modern science and I really appreciate it you know, good stuff to watch
Ksp values and common ion effects. The ocean seeks it's maximum salinity in accordance with the solubility product constants of the various ion pairs. They all interplay through common ion effect. Salinity is also a function of temperature. There's no mystery here, just basic chemistry.
I remember reading a report exposing that salt might not just be from mineral origin but that biologic methabolism was a large contributor over million of years. Oceans are some kind of a big toilet.
I remember learning that the salinity of cytoplasm, which is much less salty than the oceans, reflects the salinity of the oceans at the time that cells were invented. Is this still considered valid? It would be good to do an episode on this.
@@user-do5zk6jh1k The salinity of the cytoplasm might be the same in a freshwater or saltwater species, or in a flying animal, or terrestrial one. I think that was the point of the comment above yours. Cells "adapting to their current environment" might not include the cells' interior properties and structures. If the salinity of the cytoplasm is, in fact, shared between many distant parts of the kingdom of life, regardless of environment, then the question of "why this particular salinity" would be a good one to ask.
As Turkish person i can confirm that by different thing.We all know Turkish straits connects mediterrenean and black sea . Black sea has a lot of rivers flow to it and it s kinda locked with a exception of straits . So its much less saline ann this makes massive difference between black sea and mediterrenean salinity and that make strong and consistent currents in straits .Upper part less saline black sea waters run towards south and more saline and dense mediterrenean waters run towards north to the black sea itself.
The larger question in my mind is how much water does it take to create the salt deposits under the great lakes, and how long would it have taken? Did it take hundreds of salt water oceans evaporating lay down deposits that thick, or could just 1 or 2 events of sufficient water depth do the trick? Like if all the water in the oceans disappeared today, but left the salt behind, how thick a salt layer would it leave?
You can work that out fairly easily. As Hank said, 1 kg of seawater has about 40 g of salt. Salt is about twice as dense as water, so evaporating a 1 m column of water would leave about 2 cm of salt. Multiply that by the mean ocean depth of 3.7 km, and you get a salt layer about 74 m deep. As a round number, call it anywhere between 50-100 m of salt.
Wouldn't saltier water ultimately migrate towards the bottom of the ocean? I can imagine there are brine seas and lakes beneath the ocean where people have not measured yet.
Nope, let me give you example, when you mix salt in glass of water, salinity of whole glass changes, bottom water of glass is not more saltier. Similarly if you add salt water to glass of fresh water, salt water does not sink, but salt dissolves in rest on water, thereby reducing concentration of system as whole.
What is true, the Mediterranen Sea, as it is saltier than the ocean, exchanges salt water with a higher concentration with salt water with a bit less concentration through the street of Gibraltar all the time, and in fact the more salty water flows on the bottom.
1:09 The first syllable of the gentleman's name is Hall, as in a large assembly room or an interior walkway, not Hal, the computer or Brian Cranston's first big role.
The parts that are less salty, are they like significantly less salty? If so building desalination plans in those areas may be smarter than current locations.
plants are also built as close as pratical to the place where the waters getting pumped to ie major citys. sometimes not possible but pipeline pumping's of water is expensive . sometime like Israel they pump to there neighbor countries
3:53 I went swimming in the baltic sea yesterday (which is getting less salty over time making it hard for fish to survive that rely on a floating surface for their eggs (without it they sink into the anoxic zone) and it is really salty. I wonder how much more salty other oceans taste now...
I drank water from a depth of 1000m in the Gulf of Mexico and it was both cold and fresh. Then I got back to my unpaid work pulling water samples on the graveyard shift. I don’t really miss college.
@@giantnegro so there's a sea current that brings water from Antarctica (also salty) all the way to the gulf of Mexico (Texas I assume) and it also turns to fresh water too? Imma call bullsh*t on this one buddy.
@@ESL-O.G. “A layer of minimum salinity (34.8 to 34.9) is observed in the Gulf of Mexico at depths of 500 to 1,000 m, which originates in the Antarctic Intermediate Water…” Apparently it’s only about 10% less salty than the non-Antarctic current. Sure tasted sweeter.
I believe Halley pronounced his name like the word that is formed with the first 4 letters of his name. Since that's not either of the most commonly used pronunciations now, it doesn't really matter.
The Mediterranean is noticeably saltier than the Atlantic. I tasted the Bay of Biscay, then went across Spain to Tarragona, and tasted the Med. I have been told the Baltic is less salty than most other seas before.
@@janmelantu7490 quite ironic too, what kind of "history" can you write about given that the age of the earth was only 1mil year old back then? or they only counts up to all the "begets" in the bible?
Re: the example of the landlocked mediterranean - this doesn't parse for me. How does isolating part of a uniform saline solution, then letting the isolated portion dry up, affect the salinity of the remaining portion?
What about the theory that salt sinks to the bottom in places like that pit they found in the Gulf of Mexico. There are many holes like this in which the salt gets reabsorbed into the mantle as a metal (sodium).
Well the sea might get saltier now, with water filtered for drinking and putting brine back, and apparently there’s a whole lot of salt in the Aussie outback , so when or if the sea level rises enough more salt will flow back in . And salt flats that get in the path suddenly. Although the melting rate of ice and normal water flow may still manage to even it out. Although rivers may get driven drier due to the need of fresh water. Aka dams and water use
There is under saturation, saturation and over saturation. The properties of water combined with all the other elements, the temperature and the pressure effect the NaCL of solubility or salinity in water. I haven't watched a single second of this but merely going off the title and my chemistry classes in high school and college. The real question is what it maximum salinity of the ocean as well as if looking deep into the ocean depth is how much salt is at the bottom of the ocean. Yes people have been drying seawater to remove the salt and get sea salt for many years but it in no way getting a lot of it.
This is andtadotal. I live in Ohio. We use to get lots of snow in winter. It was white most of the time. That has changed we get less snow. We barley get any. Rain has increased a ton this year alone we are 7 in about average. The weather has changed.
On the topic of water , can anyone offer me a solid explanation as to why intact and unopened plastic water bottles seem to shrink over time ? This process can only be observed over years and I haven't had a chance to weigh the few samples I have gathered of these to figure if this follows a given constant. And please don't claim that the alternating pressure caused by the passing seasons is causing some of the water to evaporate and escape the seal as if it were acting like a valve , because if it were the case the bottles would eventually reach a point of equilibrium where a bubble would form and create a buffer zone , and it hasn't !
@@Paonporteur Yes, I know that. I am an academic chemist with a Ph.D. in the subject. My question is "How is sodium chloride removed?" Your comment correctly identifies why it should not be removed due to its high solubility. Mark
But one thing doesn't make sense to me. Potassium salts, if I'm correct, are usually just as water soluble as sodium salts, and potassium has a similar abundance in Earth's crust as sodium (I believe), so why is the ocean mostly sodium chloride.
So if the cold areas are getting fresher and the warmer areas are getting saltier then the theory that ocean circulation is slowing due to climate change is boloney. In fact the speeding up should help to keep the sea temperature constant.
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It saw CZcams’s comment section, and quickly decided there was such thing as *too* *salty* .
😄😆🤣😂
😂
Golf 👏
@Ali Al-Mahdi I have no clue how to answer you. I guess first I would say the likelihood that the urine was Ramesses II is not so good. Any liquid would have long ago evaporated, that is why mummification is so successful there. For the dreams, that depends on you and your core beliefs, cultural influences and what exactly you ingested. But from my personal experience, those are just dreams with no deeper meaning. I could see them being unsettling and disturbing but I assure you any deeper meaning you could find in them would only be the influence’s that interact with your life. If truly prophetic they would have been less abstract. But, my psychologist friend, these things you already know. For if they were real it only shows a deeply cynical outlook on beliefs which are not your own and a deep seeded need to justify that which you believe in. I have no formal education, so please take no offense to my common sense approach to answering, thank you. But you should never ingest something you don’t know for certain what it is. You could have poisoned yourself!
I love smart channels... They get smartass comments. Love the wit.
I didn't realise plants lose 90% of the water they collect through transpiration - releasing water vapour back into the atmosphere. The more plants, the more water vapour recycled through transpiration into the atmosphere. The less plants, the less water vapour recycled in those areas, and instead largely running off into the oceans.
So the more forests cut down, the dryer the atmosphere in those areas. A cause of desertification?
This is the biggest concern with the Amazon rainforest. The biggest reason that the Amazon IS a rainforest is because of transpiration. As we cut it down, there are less trees to transpire and thus leas rain in the rainforest. If deforestation goes too far, the Amazon will never be rebuilt to the way it was before.
It is an ancient forest from a time when South America was in a better position geographically and the world was more conducive to humid environments. If the rainforest is lost, the Amazon would become a savannah and eventually a desert, just like the Sahara.
Watch those NOAA timelaspes, you'll see how clouds form when the Sun light directly hits the green areas.
It's all conected, so I say yes
The Earth will correct itself when we are all gone. WW3 is a way bigger concern. Get some skills yall!
I think a part of Hawaii cut down too many trees and now doesn’t get rain
Now I'm wondering if Rare Oceans should be added to the Rare Earth and Rare Sun hypotheses. How common or uncommon is it likely to be for exoplanets to *maintain a stable and steady* salinity balancing act for billions of years?
Clarification edit: pondering specifically about *how common stable vs unstable and highly variable water salinity levels are,* _not_ evolution ability in _stable_ hypersaine oceans ;)
Nah, probably not a good filter, life works fine in salt concentrations that range many orders of magnitude. Also, a lot of the salt sinks, like the formation of evaporite rocks are universal and works in many ranges of pressure and temperature.
@@hamstsorkxxor Just because it's not a _significant_ filter (IE, it doesn't filter out a large percentage of potential environments from the pool) doesn't mean it isn't _a_ filter in some sense. Even if 99% of Earthlike worlds manage to develop stable oceans, we still need to take into account the 1% that don't. Otherwise we can't develop an accurate prediction of how many civilizations may or may not be out there.
@@General12th Nah, a mere 1% flat is already approaching statistically irrelevant for those kinds of calculations.
@@General12th 5% is well within the range of error for the basic figures, never mind 1%.
@@hamstsorkxxor The question isn't if life can exist and survive. The question is whether or not it can evolve far enough for a technological civilization which would be detectable at interstellar distances. That doesn't just require life to exist, but the thrive and develop in many different forms for a long period of time. The kind of life that exist in super salty water seem to be a lot more limited than what can exist in normal sea water.
If a planet had super salty oceans for most of its existence, I wonder what effect that would have on any life that exists there. Maybe they'd never develop beyond micro-organisms.
3:48 Fun fact:
The Baltic Sea actually gets less salty, as you get further away from the Skagerrak. That is because river water makes up a larger amount of the water there, compared to water from the North Sea (Atlantic).
Isn't that what he said in the video?
@@nunpho And didn’t he also say the oceans are salty because of the rivers?
@@nunpho No he only said the baltic sea is less salty than the average ocean.
@@Delibro yeah because of all the rivers
@@nunpho Yes it's the same reason. But the difference is the video said the Baltic Sea is less saltier than the ocean, but Lukas said there are big differences WITHIN the Baltic Sea which is true. I find that quite interesting that the water within the same sea keeps separated.
I'm a Geologist specialising in ocean tectonics and meteorites (I know, not much overlap). But we actually don't fully understand the salinity problems. Salt is weird.
Water is really weird too, and as with almost anything it's just getting weirder the more we learn about it. You've chosen cool things to specialize in! I think little overlap can be a good thing, being able to get out of a bubble and do something else is both important and a great tool to help figure things out.
Hank's explanation of "sinks" being the main source of de-salinization confused me from my minor degree level knowledge of geology, and it's never something I learned in college.
How would something like the salt flats left by evaporating seas impact even semi current salt levels? The Mediterranean is a great example, it re-filled so wouldn't almost all of its salt have been reintroduced to the global ocean?
As far as I know, the oceans haven't been close to being saturated with salt for billions of years and we don't see it just randomly precipitating. We don't see ancient salt layers spread globally consistent with a saturated concentration. Soooo SHOULDN'T the salt levels be slowly increasing, especially over the scale of 10's of millions or even billions of years? Because most low lying large salt deposits do get inundated by the sea over millions of years. And we see plenty of news salts deposited on the surface over that time scale that the seas should have been saturated a billion years ago, at least from my super basic math and observations trying to study the geology of the Great Basin.
We can't even fully understand ourselves yet we try our best to decipher the whole planet... well
To me its pretty simple. God created it all. Just like when you look at computers, software, cars, bridges, skyscrapers, language, colors, beauty and love; the complexity of it all just doesn't seem possible with randomness. There is major mathematics in it all which we can't even begin to understand the full equations. Isaac Newton was right. "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
@@jonny777bike and for you, keeping it simple is definitely the best option 🤡
Hank: Sometimes preschoolers ask some pretty great questions.
Me: As a preschool teacher, I can vouch for that.
However, as an Oregonian, preschoolers very seldom ask "Why is the sky blue?" Instead, they very sensibly ask, "Why do people always say the sky is blue?" Simple observation clearly shows them it's usually gray or white.
Take them to the desert or a mountaintop. Gotta get rid of all that pesky water vapor in your way. I hear that at the summit of Haleakala, the sky even has a bit of a violet tinge.
Sky is blue. You live in filth
but thats cool actually. theyre seeing that they cant trust what random people say when their direct observation (so, their "research") says otherwise. So they come to someone they trust, you, to figure out what thats all about lol. so, wow, preschoolers are mini scientists :')
@@pvic6959 Another point for the mini scientist idea is how many kids, after learning speech, seem to spend a long time in the "What's that?" phase, only to transition to the "Why?" stage of interaction.
Clouds or pollution may make the sky appear to be grey or white, but the sky itself most assuredly appears to be blue during daylight hours.
Ethane in Titan's methane seas plays a similar role to salt in the Earth's oceans. It seems like Ligeia Mare is like the Baltic (fresher) while Ontario Lacus is like the Dead Sea (ethane rich/'saltier') I talk about this, and Halley's age of the Earth idea, in my book "Exploring Planetary Climate" Note: Halley did not name the comet : he predicted its return. Others named it after him.
I was wondering about the role of plate tectonics but it wasn't directly mentioned here.
My first thought was whether much crustal salt was recycled into the the mantle through subduction (it struck me as unlikely).
But then I thought about all that Himalayan pink salt (and other big salt deposits/domes strewn about the world): surely all of that is evaporated salt water from ancient, now disappeared seas (think of the Tethis whose pink salt deposits can be dug out of the Himalayas).
Tectonics must surely have SOMETHING to do with the long-term relative stability of ocean salinity...
I would assume that tectonics effects are less important because once the salt has precipitated out of the ocean its already out of the salinity equation. But tectonics can make that salt inaccessible to water sources like rivers and aquafirs and even submerge it into the mantle (subduction zones also remove water & therefor salt from the seas) where it will eventually get spat out of a volcano to become part of the surface "salt cycle".
I have no way to quantify the amount of salt moved so I can't really judge how big of an impact it has other than tectonics being very slow.
Absolutely tectonics are the main drivers if only in part because without new rocks getting exposed to the water cycle there wouldn't be any salts to add to the ocean. Additionally there are limits for how quickly evaporite deposits can return to the ocean which means that there are large concentrations of evaporites and dense brine pools on the seafloor particularly within the Gulf of Mexico and Mediterranean though they are more broadly found elsewhere. These concentrated brine pools don't mix easily because of the sharp density differences but there is also a high rate of ocean sedimentation which buries evaporite deposits faster than they can get evaporated leading them to form the hydrocabon sinks which oil and natural gas can accumulate on geological timescales.
And the Tethys wasn't just a mere sea but a vast ocean which like the Atlantic formed from the break up of Pangaea that means a lot of its salts got removed/relocated too when it closed.
4:53 The Aquarius probe was part of the SAC-D satellite made primarily by Argentina, our fourth satellite out of 6 made for scientific applications
Don't salts get also processed by the biomass ? Like clams or corals ? Don't they remove salt from the ocean, and deposit it on the floor of the ocean when they die ?
Id assume that any salt incorporated into their body would just dissolve back into the ocean again when they die.
@@darkninja___ idk if that's what he meant, But shells and pearls take a lot more time to dissolve than to be produced.
And I think there are other ways salt gets deposited at the bottom, But I might be wrong
P.S.: processed can also mean it just gets turned into something else, no?
Yeah, the calcium in calcium carbonate is a salt. Calcium carbonate sea shells and corasl form limestone which binds the calcium for a long time
@@Kenionatus nacl makes the shell, where does the na sodium ion go ? Back into the ocean where it mixes with a disolved shell and dissolved back into the water right ?
@@sweis12 Good point. Never thought about it this way. I doubt it redisolves all the calcium carbonate, because why would we have limestone formations then, but the Na ions do need to go somewhere.
One question I have is: As the Great Lakes also once had mountain ranges near them that have eroded away why are they not salty?
Is the mississipi salty?
Same reason.
great lakes have direct connection to the oceans lol
They are also much younger than the oceans
@@rkozakand Yup, the Great Lakes were completely filled with continental ice sheet during the glacial periods of the current ice age. There probably weren't large lakes there until the ice sheets carved them out a bit in the last few million years.
The structural basin they're in was formed by the midcontinent rift of about 1200 million years ago though -- which is why there was a basin to carve out in the first place. It filled up with sedimentary rocks after the rifting stopped -- and only in the last few million years did enough of that rock get eroded away again.
I could have sworn I've heard they are somewhat salty, compared to most other lakes at least
All liquids have a saturation point. The saturation point will change depending on the mineral, the pressure, and the temperature. There is also the concept of supersaturation, but that's really just the saturation point at a much different pressure and temperature than we would normally encounter in nature.
Yeah but ... oceans have one set of salt saturation characteristics and the Dead Sea is super saturated at the same temp/pressure
@@ValeriePallaoro Nope. Doesn't work that way. Barring some minor differences due to the presence of other minerals, the Ksp (saturation constant) of salt in water is the same for all bodies of water, irrespective of geography, at the SAME TEMPERATURE AND PRESSURE.
1:39 Halley didn’t name the comet, it was just named after him for predicting its return.
Exactly, I wanted to comment that too. Learned this fact from a neat little book called "the anthropocene reviewed"😉
4:53 when he screams “THIS PROBE…” I jumped out of shock and spilled my ice tea and broke the glass in the floor and as I was cleaning it I stepped on glass with bare feet which made me bleed all over the place for a little while. I finally cleaned it all , took me like 35 mins for that whole thing to go down starting when I heard Hank scream.
To be honest, I don't think you really answered why the oceans aren't orders of magnitudes saltier than they presently are. You explained well why certain parts of the oceans are presently saltier than other parts.
A sea getting cut off every once in a while and drying up removes very little of the ocean's volume, so very little of the salt. Not nearly enough to remove enough salt to match your estimate that it accumulates as much salt as it presently has in 50-150 million years from rivers.
What was barely touched is the fact that salts have a maximum saturation in water of a given temperature and pressure.
You can see this with a simple kitchen experiment. Put some water in a glass, and slowly stir in table salt until the salt you are adding seems to not dissolve, but instead falls to the bottom of the glass.
-
This has to be a mechanism in the oceans as well, which helps explain the thick layers of salts in salt mines.
The salt layer being mined under Michigan can be as thick as 400+ feet (121+ meters) which cannot be explained only by evaporation of a trapped body of water unless that body of water was over 12,000 meters (around 7.5 MILES) deep when it was isolated.
*Used the following from a post above by Eroraf86 "As Hank said, 1 kg of seawater has about 40 g of salt. Salt is about twice as dense as water, so evaporating a 1 m column of water would leave about 2 cm of salt."
@@MonkeyJedi99 Oh. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Doesnt sea salt also deposit at the seafloor itself? If so, it should be getting reabsorbed into earths crust at the tectonic subduction zones?
sea salt start depositing only when more than about 160 ppt. Average of the oceans is 35 ppt.
@@Delibro parts per...(t)?
@@snakedoktor6020 ppt = parts per thousand, as stated in the video.
I myself would use percentage instead.
Yes there are the key point to remember is that salinity varies locally and thus like Earth's atmosphere isn't saturated everywhere the ocean isn't either plus there are processes which can remove salts below their individual saturation and precipitation levels too.
And more importantly once salt deposits form it takes a long time for them to re-dissolve especially given the higher density brines that result don't mix easily with the overlying ocean.
I have an aquarium in my house, so I totally understand.
This must be the kind of content I keep watching SciShow for. I have watch every Scishow video for so long, I lost track of why.
If you watch them all But you don't know why... well
I learned an unusually a large amount of information from this video. Thank you!
But some are lies.... Rivers won't add salt to ocean
@@ramalingam7252 What does if not rivers?
3:37 that Arctic circle thing, y'know? Yeah, that goes through northern Sweden, Finland, Norway and Russia as well There's quite a bit of those countries above the Arctic circle *ackchually*
I was looking for this comment, glad someone else noticed this as well 🤣
I was JUST wondering this exact thing yesterday, whether the sea is as salty as it will get, as it can get, or if it is getting saltier as more rainwater dissolves salts on land
this is the only educational show that I still watch on youtube been watching you guys since I was like 14 in high school but you guys always manage to keep it interesting and keep up with what's going on in modern science and I really appreciate it you know, good stuff to watch
Ksp values and common ion effects. The ocean seeks it's maximum salinity in accordance with the solubility product constants of the various ion pairs. They all interplay through common ion effect. Salinity is also a function of temperature. There's no mystery here, just basic chemistry.
Because it got sucked in to people's comments via osmosis
I remember reading a report exposing that salt might not just be from mineral origin but that biologic methabolism was a large contributor over million of years. Oceans are some kind of a big toilet.
I remember learning that the salinity of cytoplasm, which is much less salty than the oceans, reflects the salinity of the oceans at the time that cells were invented. Is this still considered valid? It would be good to do an episode on this.
I doubt that's true, since fresh water and salt water organisms exist. Cells are adapted to their current environment.
@@user-do5zk6jh1k The salinity of the cytoplasm might be the same in a freshwater or saltwater species, or in a flying animal, or terrestrial one. I think that was the point of the comment above yours. Cells "adapting to their current environment" might not include the cells' interior properties and structures. If the salinity of the cytoplasm is, in fact, shared between many distant parts of the kingdom of life, regardless of environment, then the question of "why this particular salinity" would be a good one to ask.
@@delphicdescant It's not the same
@@user-do5zk6jh1k source?
Interesting
What a timely video, I'm a preschool teacher and we have been learning about th oceans. Tomorrow we are talking about salinity 😅
People are being salty on social media nowadays, so all that salt stays online instead of reaching the sea.
Australia is already experiencing more extreme weather patterns.
How about the desalination process that produces hyper salty water or brine and pump to the ocean
Hank, always here to answer the important questions. 😄😉
But, seriously, thank you, Hank, for all you do, both here and at Into the Microcosmos! ❤️❤️
As Turkish person i can confirm that by different thing.We all know Turkish straits connects mediterrenean and black sea . Black sea has a lot of rivers flow to it and it s kinda locked with a exception of straits . So its much less saline ann this makes massive difference between black sea and mediterrenean salinity and that make strong and consistent currents in straits .Upper part less saline black sea waters run towards south and more saline and dense mediterrenean waters run towards north to the black sea itself.
I knew this happened, but man, I did NOT see a whole 10% of the ocean's salt just being wiped out in one go.
The larger question in my mind is how much water does it take to create the salt deposits under the great lakes, and how long would it have taken? Did it take hundreds of salt water oceans evaporating lay down deposits that thick, or could just 1 or 2 events of sufficient water depth do the trick?
Like if all the water in the oceans disappeared today, but left the salt behind, how thick a salt layer would it leave?
You can work that out fairly easily. As Hank said, 1 kg of seawater has about 40 g of salt. Salt is about twice as dense as water, so evaporating a 1 m column of water would leave about 2 cm of salt. Multiply that by the mean ocean depth of 3.7 km, and you get a salt layer about 74 m deep. As a round number, call it anywhere between 50-100 m of salt.
Wouldn't saltier water ultimately migrate towards the bottom of the ocean? I can imagine there are brine seas and lakes beneath the ocean where people have not measured yet.
I think that should be true, as it is more dense.
Nope, let me give you example, when you mix salt in glass of water, salinity of whole glass changes, bottom water of glass is not more saltier.
Similarly if you add salt water to glass of fresh water, salt water does not sink, but salt dissolves in rest on water, thereby reducing concentration of system as whole.
@@atwarroyal8770 What's true in 15 cm of water is not true in 5 km of water.
What is true, the Mediterranen Sea, as it is saltier than the ocean, exchanges salt water with a higher concentration with salt water with a bit less concentration through the street of Gibraltar all the time, and in fact the more salty water flows on the bottom.
@@Delibro suez canal contributes a bit too, although canal depth means it is lot slower
Well, I don’t care how big the Big Salt Shaker (as shown in thumbnail) is, it’s gotta run out eventually = no saltier.
1:09 The first syllable of the gentleman's name is Hall, as in a large assembly room or an interior walkway, not Hal, the computer or Brian Cranston's first big role.
The parts that are less salty, are they like significantly less salty? If so building desalination plans in those areas may be smarter than current locations.
Like in the Baltic sea
Ocean salinity ranges between 33-37 grams per liter. This difference is not enough to matter much to desalination.
The parts that are less salty are usually fed by lots of rivers, so they probably don’t need desalination
plants are also built as close as pratical to the place where the waters getting pumped to ie major citys. sometimes not possible but pipeline pumping's of water is expensive . sometime like Israel they pump to there neighbor countries
areas like death valley and great salt lake collect the salt dry and remove it from the water table as the ground dries out
3:53 I went swimming in the baltic sea yesterday (which is getting less salty over time making it hard for fish to survive that rely on a floating surface for their eggs (without it they sink into the anoxic zone) and it is really salty. I wonder how much more salty other oceans taste now...
Hank: "So in 2011 NASA launched the Aquarius satellite..."
Me: "This is the launching of the satellite Aquarius"
Leeeeet the salt water in. The salt water innnn.
At the same time, the soil is becoming too salty and we have billions of tons of salt on land we could dump in the ocean.
rain is ment to do that
I drank water from a depth of 1000m in the Gulf of Mexico and it was both cold and fresh. Then I got back to my unpaid work pulling water samples on the graveyard shift. I don’t really miss college.
Like, ocean water?
@@LiveYourLifeWithJoy yes. The water at 1000m is part of a deep sea current originating from Antarctica. It’s basically fresh water.
@@giantnegro so there's a sea current that brings water from Antarctica (also salty) all the way to the gulf of Mexico (Texas I assume) and it also turns to fresh water too? Imma call bullsh*t on this one buddy.
@@ESL-O.G. “A layer of minimum salinity (34.8 to 34.9) is observed in the Gulf of Mexico at depths of 500 to 1,000 m, which originates in the Antarctic Intermediate Water…”
Apparently it’s only about 10% less salty than the non-Antarctic current. Sure tasted sweeter.
@@giantnegro alright. That's crazy. You were half right.
Don’t be so hard on a scientist. He asked a question and he got an answer. It was wrong, but that’s how we learn
An incomplete answer.
You're right tho, but Hank wasn't hard on him
It got to see how others see it when sailors started imitating it's language.
Wait... so you're telling me it's "Ha-lee's" Comet, not *"Hay-lee's"* Comet??
Eh, The video is about science, not language.
@@Jabberwockybird (woosh)
I believe Halley pronounced his name like the word that is formed with the first 4 letters of his name. Since that's not either of the most commonly used pronunciations now, it doesn't really matter.
What is happening in the 3:36 map projection? It's fascinatingly messed up 😂
I think the projection itself is fine, it's just that the arctic/antarctica circles are mislabeled
@@1224chrisng then why is Greenland sideways and how is central America so wide 😭
@@1224chrisng he has a point. And those lines aren't accurate ig
@@Niinkai Oh crap, I just thought they left out Greenland. That's not even Mercator, that's a "specifically screw Greenland" composite
The Mediterranean is noticeably saltier than the Atlantic. I tasted the Bay of Biscay, then went across Spain to Tarragona, and tasted the Med. I have been told the Baltic is less salty than most other seas before.
The sea is filled with organisms. You're tasting a lot more than just water 💦
Our ocean is a pro e-sports gamer. That is why it is salty.
most of then are ragequitters
Hold on, how does a satellite monitor the salinity of the ocean? Does salinity affect the ocean's color? Or it's temperature?
I like making hypotheses about scishows titles and seeing how close I am to the answer
"brine rejection" sounds like a weirdly metal band name
I wonder if massiv desalination to produce drinking water form the oceans, would influence the overall saltiness of the seas
This talk about salt and saltwater made me thirsty as heck
I have this thought every time I piss into the ocean.
Reverse osmosis brine waste also increases the salinity of places like the Persian Gulf
Even a stupid question can lead to a brilliant answer...
Never stop questioning, folks!
Measuring salinity from space? How does that work?
Halley's main contribution to you, me and everyone else: He made Newton's principia (i.e. SCIENCE!) possible
And he only got paid in copies of “The History of Fish”
@@janmelantu7490 quite ironic too, what kind of "history" can you write about given that the age of the earth was only 1mil year old back then? or they only counts up to all the "begets" in the bible?
Re: the example of the landlocked mediterranean - this doesn't parse for me. How does isolating part of a uniform saline solution, then letting the isolated portion dry up, affect the salinity of the remaining portion?
Because the water from the isolated part is being added back to the ocean via the water cycle, but the salt isn't.
@@peterprime2140 you're right, But 10% of the oceans salt? Seems too much
@@peterprime2140 ah true
What about the theory that salt sinks to the bottom in places like that pit they found in the Gulf of Mexico. There are many holes like this in which the salt gets reabsorbed into the mantle as a metal (sodium).
Basaltic seafloor is a gigantic sodium sink so this is also one reason salt concentration was mostly constant for millions of years.
So, Salt keeps going to the oceans But also keeps "storing" itself on the floor?
@@LiveYourLifeWithJoy Yes. Ocean ridges where new seafloor is created is also the place where sodium is incorporated into basaltic rocks.
Well the sea might get saltier now, with water filtered for drinking and putting brine back, and apparently there’s a whole lot of salt in the Aussie outback , so when or if the sea level rises enough more salt will flow back in . And salt flats that get in the path suddenly. Although the melting rate of ice and normal water flow may still manage to even it out. Although rivers may get driven drier due to the need of fresh water. Aka dams and water use
Thanks for your sharing
There is under saturation, saturation and over saturation. The properties of water combined with all the other elements, the temperature and the pressure effect the NaCL of solubility or salinity in water. I haven't watched a single second of this but merely going off the title and my chemistry classes in high school and college. The real question is what it maximum salinity of the ocean as well as if looking deep into the ocean depth is how much salt is at the bottom of the ocean. Yes people have been drying seawater to remove the salt and get sea salt for many years but it in no way getting a lot of it.
Very, very good. RS
Shopify is a game changer.
This is andtadotal. I live in Ohio. We use to get lots of snow in winter. It was white most of the time. That has changed we get less snow. We barley get any. Rain has increased a ton this year alone we are 7 in about average. The weather has changed.
I didn't even know the ocean was salty when I was in preschool. That's what comes from living in Kansas.
How does a satelite measure salinity?
This
On the topic of water , can anyone offer me a solid explanation as to why intact and unopened plastic water bottles seem to shrink over time ? This process can only be observed over years and I haven't had a chance to weigh the few samples I have gathered of these to figure if this follows a given constant. And please don't claim that the alternating pressure caused by the passing seasons is causing some of the water to evaporate and escape the seal as if it were acting like a valve , because if it were the case the bottles would eventually reach a point of equilibrium where a bubble would form and create a buffer zone , and it hasn't !
I don't know, but I would assume water vapor escaping through the plastic, which isn't completely impermeable.
Idk, But plastic shrinks when exposed to heat
My plastic water bottle evaporated after years. The water left, evaporated through the empty places in the plastic.
Supposedly they don't do that.
There has to be a supply of salt left over for my dinner.
The more I learn the more I’m aware the existence of the designer behind nature. Evidence in nature itself.
I guess people stopped roasting the ocean.
Awesome video! You mention the NASA probe being launched in 2011. Why not mention its findings if there are any, given that was 10 years ago?
Salty
Twitter started taking all the salt
You have not really answered the question. How is sodium chloride removed? Where is all the evaporation forming anhydrites happening today?
@@Paonporteur Yes, I know that. I am an academic chemist with a Ph.D. in the subject. My question is "How is sodium chloride removed?" Your comment correctly identifies why it should not be removed due to its high solubility. Mark
The thumbnail is Let’s Game It Out vibes.
great episode, thank you
Looks like the image links in the description have been glommed together, I guess normally they have newline breaks between them?
Please make a video about how the auqarius Satellite works! I'm very curious, how does it measure salinity from space?
is there not a point a solution will no longer dissolve any more solids in this case salt?
Dip your fries in the ocean
Still sharp after all these years Hank!
But one thing doesn't make sense to me. Potassium salts, if I'm correct, are usually just as water soluble as sodium salts, and potassium has a similar abundance in Earth's crust as sodium (I believe), so why is the ocean mostly sodium chloride.
There's another reason, too: Osmotic Equilibrium
What kind of instrument measures the salinity of surface water from space?
No question is a stupid question as long as you listen to the answer.
Mineral cycles and water cycles coincide so closely.
The sea stopped getting salty because the beach finally waved back.
Zeus stopped making ocean babies.
i always wonder how winter salt from trying to de-ice the roads affects the salinity of the ocean
The mixing of denser, saltier water to the bottom of the ocean must be an exception to the 200 m rule announced earlier in the video.
The ocean stopped getting saltier because it learned to git gud.
1:12 Halley wasn't that far off, he was off by a factor of 20 or so, having nothing else to go on, that's pretty close
could flood rates be tracked if we find some kind of fossciles that recort the salt level
So if the cold areas are getting fresher and the warmer areas are getting saltier then the theory that ocean circulation is slowing due to climate change is boloney. In fact the speeding up should help to keep the sea temperature constant.
Brine Rejection was my nickname in high school