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

Salt gets into rivers when material that can’t be dissolved is stripped away by erosion. This exposes new water soluble compounds to the water, where they dissolve into the water and are taken to the ocean.

Over millions of years erosion removes innumerable tons of material, essentially mining the subsurface soluble compounds and delivering them to the ocean. Once there, as you mention ,those salts remain in the ocean. On Earth, this process began billions of years ago and has been adding salt to the oceans ever since.

However without that land based salt mining process, how salty would the oceans be? Lots of good clues in this thread, but I don’t think anyone has offered a definitive answer.

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