When we think about a salty liquid, such as seawater, instantly we imagine table salt (sodium chloride) as the component making this salty. Do not be surprised, but the seawater is this, with a slight difference: rather than just table salt, we also found other elements, in theory, all the elements of the periodic table are present in the seawater. This may seem a little strange, however, to get to that many elements, it took millions of years of chemical, physical, geological and biological processes, which will not be seen in detail in this post. Learning about these processes is essential to understand the reasons that have made (and are still making) the seawater salty as we know.
Look at this previous post: https://ourpanthalassa.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/how-the-ocean-was-formed/ it was said that: “… Rain 20 million years, was a quite long rain! Then the surface was cold enough to allow the liquid water to drain from the steep and flat zones into deeper basins… “. This short statement highlights two types of processes: geological (erosion and decomposition of rocks with the help of accumulated water in rivers, lakes and seas), and chemical (dissolution of these compounds, which could be salt, starting then, the process of formation of the “seawater”).
We were seen this process in macroscopically and general way. It is also critical to understand the molecular processes, which involve dissolving the molecules into the water. The water molecule possesses poles of opposite charge (polar molecule), so it can easily dissolve compounds whose elements are connected by opposite electrical charge attractions (e.g., salts), since the positive charge attracts particles with a negative one when its negative charge is the opposite, separating and dissolving these compounds. See an illustrated example of how this process occurs:
The seawater is salty, as we know, because of its polar nature and geological processes occurring since the formation of the ocean. Remember, salinity (salt concentration) in the ocean is not constant everywhere, it varies depending on sea conditions and location. We will treat this matter at some future posting.
Ocean Science 