As shown here in this documentary, at about 8:10
Apparenty newly minted Russian submariners have to drink a half litre of sea water just before they go to sea.
While obviously it’s a one time thing, half a litre is quite a lot. Plus sea water is pretty dirty.
Any other naval service do this?
A half a liter isn’t really that much. Seawater is not poison, as long as you follow up with other liquids you will just pee it out. Drinking a half a liter of Vodka by chugging it is just if not more dangerous.
What @Si_Amigo said. The health risk from drinking seawater comes from osmosis: When salt water enters your digestive system, the concentration of salt in the water in your body that’s outside the cells will rise relative to the concentration of salt in your cells. This will start a process of osmosis whereby water flows through the cell walls out of the cells. So the cells are drained of water - effectively, and ironically, you’re dying of thirst (and of course you will only make things worse if you try to counteract that feeling of thirst by drinking more seawater). But if you drink fresh water after the seawater intake, you can make up for the added salt in your body, and you’ll be fine.
Health risk for salt water. Sea water has a hell of a lot more bad stuff than just salts,
Sure they could clean those out, but then process would also remove the salts.
I would expect that the “bad stuff” would be microorganisms, in which case you could render it safe (in moderation) by simply bringing it to a boil.
Seawater is generally safer with regards to those microbes than freshwater because salt is harmful to a lot of those things (for instance, nagleria fowleri, the dreaded brain-eating amoeba, cannot survive in saltwater, although that amoeba is a nasal-entry risk, not an ingestion risk)
To answer the OP: Half a liter of seawater is a lot. It contains around 17 grams of salt - and the recommended human adult daily value for sodium is less than 2.3 grams. You may be able to safely neutralize/flush it by drinking lots of freshwater afterwards, but it’s still bad dose of salt - over 7x the recommended intake for one day.
Don’t they just barf it up?
Salt water is one way to make someone vomit.
Another take …
Where are Russian Navy sailors “just before they go to sea”? On a dock in a Russian Navy harbor.
I’m going to suggest the pollutants, petroleum waste, radioactive particles, and all the rest are vastly more dangerous than the salt, fish shit, or oceanic bacteria. The enterobacteria living in the untreated human sewage most likely floating in said harbor is probably no picnic either.
Not at that concentration.
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A quick google of how to prepare saltwater for vomiting says to put two heaping teaspoons of salt in a glass of water. Going with a 16oz glass, and “heaping” meaning perhaps 14g instead of 11.4g that Google gives for 2tsp. That makes slightly less than a half liter of saltwater at 29.5 g/L concentration.
So it seems that the Russian drink would be slightly more volume and higher concentration at 34g/L. If the barf recipe is correct (and if my math isn’t wonky), I would imagine the Russians would barf.
A couple of factors that might change things: barf recipes say it needs to be warm water, and seawater has lots of other things in it that may change the body’s response.
But then, if you told me that a military has an initiation ritual that involves the new recruits throwing up, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Maybe they do.
Hmm, I have always heard more (2 tablespoons per half glass) , and yes, warm. I found litre of seawater contains 35g or 6 teaspoons. So yeah, 1/2 liter is 3 teaspoons or more than what you found for the harf recipe. So, they’d likely get nauseous. Good point.
But I also see the vomit recipe varies widely and is no longer recommended .