Why Is the Ocean Salty?

Curious Kids Every Day: A Daily Educational Podcast

This episode of Curious Kids Every Day explores why ocean water is salty, explaining how minerals from rocks dissolve in rainwater, travel v

Key takeaways

• Rainwater dissolves tiny amounts of minerals from rocks on land.
• Rivers carry dissolved minerals to the ocean, contributing to salinity.

Main topics

• Origin of ocean salinity
• Role of rivers in transporting minerals

Notable quotes

When ocean water evaporates, the dissolved salts stay behind.

Conclusion

Ocean saltiness results from a continuous cycle: rain dissolves rock m

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Why is the ocean salty? Hi! Welcome to Curious Kids Everyday! I'm Josh. How are you doing today? It's so good to hear from you. Hey, when you hear these sounds, what place do you think of? Speaker 1 (0:33) I think about the beach. My family loves going to the beach. You know, the last time I was at the beach, something kind of strange happened. Do you want to hear about it? Well, I accidentally got a big mouthful of ocean water. And you know how it tasted? Have you ever gotten ocean water in your mouth? Speaker 1 (0:59) Yeah, it doesn't taste very good does it? It's very very very salty but you know, I also have a lake near my house and That water doesn't taste like salt at all. I wouldn't drink that water either though But but it doesn't taste salty Why is that? Why does ocean water at the beach taste salty, but other bodies of water usually don't? Let's figure it out today. Okay, so where is all that salt in the ocean coming from? Well, a lot of it starts on the land with rocks. See, rocks contain different minerals. And when rain falls onto the ground, and hits the rocks, some of those minerals in the rocks get slowly dissolved into the water. And the amount is, it's very tiny. Like if you scooped some river water into a glass cup, you wouldn't see little pieces of salt floating around in there. It's very, very tiny. It's all dissolved very well into the water. Speaker 1 (2:33) Now the thing about water is that it's always moving downhill and rainwater is the same way. Once it comes down from the sky and hits the ground, it runs downhill into little streams. Streams flow into rivers. And where do a lot of rivers eventually end up? Yep, the ocean. So rivers are constantly carrying small amounts of dissolved minerals from rocks on land into the ocean. Speaker 1 (3:14) But wait, I've been to a river before and it wasn't salty. Shouldn't rivers taste salty too? Speaker 1 (3:25) Well, rivers usually have a much, much smaller amount of salt in them. They're also constantly moving.