New answers tagged water
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The rivers in the sky are real rivers, but they are rivers of air, not rivers of water like the Nile or the Amazon. They are called jet streams. The one which concerns us most is the Northern Polar Jet Stream, because it affects our weather. It also has an effect on high flying aircraft. The jet stream, as it is usually referred to, is roughly 300 miles wide,...
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Salt does sink to the bottom in the oceans.
Why? Your question referring to salt. Salt is a solid chemical compound. Take a lump of rock salt of sodium chloride, throw it into the water: it will sink to the bottom. The reason is that the density of sodium chloride with more than 2 g/cm3 is higher than the density of seawater less than 1.1 g/cm3.
Of ...
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We pump it out. Open and closed pit mines usually have pumping installations to get the water out.
Look up Mine dewatering on Wikipedia.
There have also been numerous accidents in the past where mines were flooded (YouTube: Turkey mining accident: 18 workers trapped after underground water floods mine), and when left alone many abandoned mines will fill up ...
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And then there is the saturation issue. Salt can be dissolved in water to a certain degree only. Once that degree is exceeded the salt begins to fall out and sink to the ground. If I remember well the limit for water is something like 35g per litre (depending on the temperature)
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I'm a regular from the Physics Stack Exchange reporting for duty.
Why this is a serious question
This is a bigger question than you might be giving it credit for. The question is ultimately similar to asking why all the air molecules in the atmosphere do not fall to the floor. Your question comes from a very solid principle in physics which could be called ...
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But it does, but according to each salt's solubility and density. Soluble salts tend to mix into the water and keep suspended. Insoluble salts separate from the solution and creates deposits in the oceanic floor.
One famous example was the "de-ironing" of the seas, when iron salts were deposited in the bottom due to the oxigenation of the oceanic water, by ...
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Why does the salt in the oceans not sink to the bottom?
Because there isn't any "salt", per se, in the ocean. Salt, as the compound sodium chloride (NaCl) does not exist as a solid in the ocean. It is dissolved into sodium and chloride ions (charged atoms) that exist within the ocean as a homogenous phase (that is, a "thing").
That said, water with sodium ...
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Saltier water has higher mass density, so the gravitational energy can be lowered that way. The concentration differences go up until the free-energy of creating that big a concentration difference balances the gravitational energy change.
Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Making some simplifying assumptions, they find:
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Turbulence, because seawater is, almost, always on the move saltier water is mixed with fresher by wave action and, to a lesser extent in surface waters, by Brownian motion. In Fjordland the annual rainfall is so high (up to 8000mm) that there is a permanent freshwater layer several metres thick that you can drink from sitting over the salt water from the ...
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When dissolved in water, salt breaks up into sodium and chlorine ions, which combine with water molecules so they cannot easily sink. However, there is a tendency for streams of fresh water to float on salt water and rise to the top. This caused problems for British submarines in the Dardanelles Straits during WW1. Moving from almost fresh water to the ...
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