Comment on If a planet was completely covered in water, wouldn't it all be freshwater?

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HotDayBreeze@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

The presence of sodium and chlorine on the planet makes sense to me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s dissolved in the water. I think the key understanding is if the water cycle is the key component of dissolving salt in water, or if the much less dramatic erosion on the bottom of the ocean is sufficient to make the water notably salty.

So far the best answer I’ve got is that water in comets and otherwise outside the planet might actually be something like salty, so maybe freshwater is just a temporary aberration of the water cycle.

At the same time, we know there are some processes that remove salt from oceans (e.g. the salt formations at the bottom of the Dead Sea), so in the end I think it would come down to where that balance of salt in vs salt out. It’s not totally clear to me that without the continental influx of salt from rivers, that that balance would result in something like freshwater or saltwater. This thread has highlighted several factors that come in on both sides, so it may be something we won’t know until we’ve explored more planets.

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