Salt in Oceans

And providing just a bit more context for Slevesque, the term "fundamentalism" as a label applied to conservative Christians emerged in the 1910's in reaction to a set of books published in reaction to concerns about liberal trends and describing what it called "The Fundamentals" that emphasized, among other key points, the inerrancy of Scripture.I personally was engaged in debates with fundamentalists about creationism years and years before I'd ever heard of Al-Qaeda, but the extremism of Al-Qaeda has brought increased attention to concerns about the potential dangers of fundamentalism in any form. The analogs between conservative Middle East Islamic countries and America's Bible Belt in terms of ignorance, backwardness and militant attitudes are not subtle.--Percy

Doings in the Bible Belt don't make it to New England, either. It isn't because you're in Canada that you don't know this, it's because you're unfamiliar with the background details of the creation/evolution controversy. The Canadian editions of books about it are not edited to excise the portions about the origins of fundamentalism, and the web is country neutral, so the information is available to you.Summarizing this topic so far, it would seem that accurately assessing the rates of all the various inputs and outputs of oceanic salt is not a simple task.--Percy

They are as common as rain. Even with those who combine ignorance with exuberance and impulsivity, the better solution is probably just to provide accurate information. You mean like the moon dust and shrinking sun arguments that we still regularly see here? And that are not abandoned even after links to webpages at places like AIG that clearly explain these fallacies (e.g., Far Out Claims About Astronomy) are provided?--Percy

Hi Slevesque,Could you please stop using the "Gen Reply" button when replying to a specific message? Thanks! We weren't talking about you. You claimed that you "have never felt this behavior from creationists at all," meaning creationists who advocated invalid arguments such as those enumerated at AIG and CMI. But you're dead wrong because we see such creationists here all the time, often, as pointed out by Pandion, because they've been influenced by Hovind, Patton or Baugh, and there are other flakes out there, too.Over the breadth of threads in which you're participating you are gradually revealing an increasingly marked disparity between the number of and degree of conviction in your opinions versus the level of your knowledge. The quality of much of your thinking is to be admired, but until your knowledge level increases it would seem that a bit more tentativity is called for.--Percy

You say the rates of addition and removal of salt match, right?If they match, then the amount of salt in the oceans does not change over time, right?Therefore the amount of salt in the oceans cannot be a measure of the age of the oceans, right? Bodies of water shrinking and eventually disappearing due to evaporation become so salty that only halophiles (organisms that require salty water) can survive. Fossil halophiles are of course found in salt deposits, see for example Origins of halophilic microorganisms in ancient salt deposits.--Percy

So you think that when water evaporates from a salt water sea that it carries the salt with it? And then the salt returns to earth when the water condenses and falls to Earth as rain? Are you sure about that? Did you know that a common method of salt production involves evaporation ponds, where the water evaporates and leaves the salt behind? Wind blowing across seas and oceans transports salt some distance inland - is this the kind of thing you're thinking of with your "~457 tons annually" figure?But however the salt is deposited on land, how would adding salt to the seas and oceans increase their salinity if the salt came from the seas and oceans in the first place? Sedimentation beneath any sea includes fossils of the creatures that live there. Any sea that begins shrinking due to evaporation experiences an increase in salinity, and if the evaporation continues long enough then the salt begins precipitating out and forms salt deposits on the sea bottom, rather than the normal sedimentary layers consisting of sand and mud and so on. When a sea reaches a very high salinity level then only halophiles can live there. Some halophiles *are* diatoms, some aren't. The primary distinction is that halophiles occupy very salty seas where most other species cannot survive. Halophiles are what you should expect to find in salt deposits that formed from evaporated seas, and that's what we do find.--Percy

I've been waiting for a response from Jason, but since it's been a few days there's something I need to clarify. I evidently misunderstood Jason's explanations and mistakenly came to believe that he thought that salt evaporates with the water. I understand now that he was just referring to the water cycle.Jason is correct that salt constantly flows into the world's oceans, but as others have pointed out, he is ignoring that salt is also removed from the oceans, dismissing it as irrelevant. The next time he fills his bathtub he should let us know if the fact that the drain is open is irrelevant.What I think Jason was attempting to say is that once salt beds are on land that they will eventually wash back into the sea, and he is correct. But at the same time new salt beds are being formed. For example, the Aral Sea in the former Soviet Union is gradually disappearing, leaving behind vast salt plains.Oceans form when continents divide and spread apart, and salt flows into these oceans. Oceans are closed in and eventually disappear when continents collide. Continents rising and falling can also isolate seas and oceans, causing them to eventually evaporate and disappear. For example, Arches National Park in Utah sits atop a salt bed thousands of feet thick that formed millions of years ago when an ancient ocean evaporated as that region of the continent lifted.--Percy