CHAPTER 1 I’ve got questions about Whipping Up a Batch of Planet Earth Pretend you live on a planet without air water or rock beneath your feet What does that look like Hint not much Luckily planet Earth is made up of amazing elements like oxygen carbon and sodium that give us everything we need to thrive Check out these answers to some of your most elemental questions
PLANET EARTH Why is ocean water salty Ever take a gulp of cool refreshing seawater Blegh Salty It turns out there are loads of salt in our oceans In fact if you spread that salt across the Earth’s entire land surface it would form a layer 152 meters 500 feet deep roughly as tall as a 40-story building So how did it get there It starts with rain Water that falls from the sky is a tiny bit acidic When that rainwater hits rocks on the ground it dissolves the minerals in the rocks Those minerals then enter rivers and streams and flow into the ocean When the Sun comes out the seawater heats up a little and evaporates causing the remaining water to become even saltier Freshwater Fact Lakes and rivers contain salt and other minerals too but they are less salty than our oceans so we can’t taste it
Why is some water turquoise and some water brown Water is actually perfectly clear But a funny thing happens in large bodies of water such as rivers lakes or oceans As sunlight passes through all the little droplets the light splits up and scatters creating a very faint blue tinge Water reflects the blue sky above it too Water also tends to pick up the color of what’s in it Turquoise water found in mountain lakes and streams is often full of finely ground rock from ancient glaciers The bright bluish-green color we see is caused by the way light bounces off all those tiny rock particles Brown water might include a lot of stirred-up dirt clay or sand One river in Alberta Canada sometimes looks pink Iron and other colorful minerals flow through it
