4 ms·

Supposing a terraforming species (like humans) never arose, will the ocean get saltier and saltier over the eons and eventually be inhospitable to all but the h

• QAPereo 9y ago
  Salinity levels will vary, but there is no trend to increasing salinity globally. Remember that water is still being “added” to the surface through volcanic activity, and the water cycle dominates, while the current rate of loss to space is quite low. I’m not sure whether volcanic activity is likely to slow before Sol starts to seriously cook off our water, but one of those would eventually lead to a reduction of surface water. That in turn, as with the Dead Sea, will lead to a higher concentration of dissolved solids in seawater. The current (meaning billion+ years) homeostasis goes like this: https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/physical-ocean/salinity https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/physical...
• labster 9y ago
  IANAG, but you're not accounting for processes that remove salt from the ocean. All of our salt mines come from somewhere -- crust that's been elevated to make an inland sea, that gradually evaporates and leaves a salt deposit. This can then get buried. Possibly when the tectonic processes stop on Earth, the oceans will continue to get salty from weathering of rocks. And you won't have much addition of water from volcanism, only a little bit from space. But life gets generally hard without active tectonics anyway.