The Mystery Of Salt

Here is another one of those unanswered questions about the world around us that no one ever really seems to ask. The oceans contain a vast amount of salt dissolved in the water. Where on earth did all of this salt come from?

Salt is a simple molecule consisting of one atom of sodium and one of chlorine. This forms sodium chloride, common table salt and which also fills the oceans. Has anyone ever wondered where all the sodium and all the chlorine that it would take to make all of this salt came from and how the two managed to get together? Both elements are practically unknown on earth except in salt. (By the way, salt is a chemical term for a product of an acid-base reaction and there are many different salts but here I am referring only to sodium chloride.)

It is easy to believe that the salt comes from comes from water running over and dissolving rocks in rivers on it's way to the sea. But this cannot be the case. Rock can be pulverised, but it forms sand and not salt. Sand is heavier than water and sinks to the bottom while salt is light enough to dissolve in water in large quantities.

Furthermore, igneous rocks like granite and basalt consist of silicon and oxygen in their chemical structure, and not sodium or chlorine. Sand is basically impure silica. Essentially all the sodium and chlorine we obtain is made by breaking down salt by electrolysis. The sodium and chlorine that makes the salt in the oceans could not possibly have been washed there by water flowing over land.

Salt is found on land, there are salt deserts and salt mines as well as places where salt has been compressed to form rock salt. But this is on land that was formerly part of a sea floor that has raised up. When the water evaporated, the salt was left behind.

I am certain that the sodium and chlorine in salt must have reacted together before being dissolved in water. We know that the water on earth almost certainly came from comets, which some astronomers have described as "dirty snowballs". There seems to me to be no doubt that the salt in the oceans must have come from space too, in the comets or an asteroid that hit earth.

It is well-known that the sun is a second generation star. A former star exploded that already contained heavy elements that can only be cooked up in stars by nuclear fusion from the primordial hydrogen and helium in the universe. That is why we have rocks and metals today. Stars fuse lighter elements from previous reactions into heavier elements.

Notice that, considering all elements, sodium and chlorine are relatively close in atomic number. Sodium has 11 protons in it's nucleus and chlorine has 17. My hypothesis is that when the former star exploded in a supernova, a chunk of it's outer layers of lighter elements was hurled into space and became the comet or asteroid that added the salt to the earth's oceans. Note also that lesser amounts of other elements around this range are often found with salt such as magnesium (12), potassium (19) and, calcium (20).

Thus, I would like to announce today that all of the salt in the earth's oceans must have come fom outer space and that this seems to prove the popular theory that water on earth must have come from comets. For more information, see the posting on this blog "New Thinking About The Origin Of Comets And Water", on this blog.