This is a long standing request that I have been waiting to do, although I wasn't quite sure I had that much to say about it at first. But before we get to why the sea is salty now and how salt is left behind when water evaporates, lets talk about how all that salt got into the sea in the first place. Better yet, how did we even get seas for there to be so much salt in anyway? Cast your mind back say 3.5 billion years, give or take, when the world was just forming into a huge molten rock. In those days, Earth's early atmosphere contained a lot of hydrogen and probably quite a lot of water vapour too, as oxygen and hydrogen bond readily to form water. But, as the earth was a giant volcanic molten mess at the time, the surface and atmosphere were far too hot for liquid water. As you may know, boiling points are subject to conditions such as pressure (that's why rapid boiling tubes use a high pressure, like in a coffee machine) but also the composition of the atmosphere, wh
A place for me to share my thoughts on science, data and the world