Common elements of table salt make oceans taste dry, bitter

"Why is ocean water salty?" asked Tristan Sproul, 11, a fifth-grader at O'Plaine School in Gurnee.

Did you ever gulp a mouthful of ocean water? It tastes terrible -- very bitter and dry.

One time with that yucky taste in your mouth is all it takes for you to quickly learn to clamp your mouth shut when you swim in the ocean.

"This is a great question, whether you are 8 years old or 88 years old," said Dr. Stephen Riser, professor of oceanography at Washington University in Seattle.

"Seawater is a complex mixture of many things. Nearly all of the naturally occurring elements in the periodic table occur in seawater. Of course, the most common things in seawater, besides the hydrogen and oxygen that make up the water itself, are sodium and chloride ions, which are the components of common table salt and make ocean water taste salty to us."

Oceans get most of their water from rivers and rain. River water carries with it all the sediments, salts and impurities from the river bed. Evaporation takes away some of the water, leaving concentrations of the sediments and salts.

"These impurities, generically known as salts, interact with each other, the life in the sea and the seafloor in extremely complex ways. Some of the salts are removed completely to appear somewhere else, such as in organisms or rocks, and some are transformed into new substances via complex chemical reactions," Riser said.

What about places where the water is extra salty, so salty that very little water remains?

Overly salty water can be found in Utah's Great Salt Lake, in the Dead Sea between Israel and Jordan and in the Red Sea between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

"If the evaporation exceeds the precipitation, then there is a net loss of water and the salinity increases," Riser said.

Hot, dry desert winds create rapid evaporation on these bodies of water, causing the water to disappear. Because of the desert locations, very little rain occurs that could replenish the water, leaving extremely salty water.

"The result of all of these interactions is that the ocean is full of "salts," with by far the most common of these being the ions of sodium and chloride that make up table salt," Riser said.