Do many people know this?
I think the underlying surprising fact is that the mean depth of the oceans is over 12,000 feet.
There’s twice as much ocean as land, so a 500ft layer blanketing the land surface is only around 2 percent of the oceans by volume. That concentration of salt isn’t in itself surprising, in fact I think the 500ft figure is a little low.
The original Gaia hypothesis (?) mentioned that one indication that a greater good seemed to be at work geologically, was that if all the salt on earth got into the oceans at the same time, the oceans would be too saline to support life. Interestingly, the earth is continually developing new shallows that eventually become salt pans and then trap layers of salt under the soil thus ensuring the oceans do not get too salty. One example is the vast expanses of salt layers under central North America, where there used to be an ocean in the dinosaur age.
The concentration of salt in seawater (its salinity) is about 35 parts per thousand ; in other words, about 3.5% of the weight of seawater comes from the dissolved salts. In a cubic mile of seawater, the weight of the salt (as sodium chloride) would be about 120 million tons.
[Moderating]
“Hey, look at this neat fact I found” is a better fit for MPSIMS than FQ. Moving.
Or maybe just move the three posts into the Interesting Random Facts thread? I doubt this one random fact deserves a whole thread of its own. But maybe that’s just me.
It was a joke once, for 20 minutes
Sounds like a meal at Sonic.
This would increase the diameter of the earth by .01 percent.
Now everyone does.