How much salt is there in the Dead Sea?

Asked by: Marty O’Neill, by email

The Dead Sea has a salinity of 33.7 per cent. This is almost 10 times saltier than ordinary seawater. If you evaporated a litre of Dead Sea water, you’d have around 250g of salt left behind, and in the whole of the Dead Sea there are about 37 billion tonnes of the stuff.

Ordinary sea salt is 97 per cent sodium chloride whereas Dead Sea salt is a mixture of lots of different chloride and bromide salts. Ordinary sodium chloride only makes up about 30 per cent. That’s still enough to supply the entire population of the UK with cooking salt for 70 thousand years!

Read more:

• Could the ocean ever become too salty for life to exist?
• The thought experiment: What would happen if the ocean froze over?

Subscribe to BBC Focus magazine for fascinating new Q&As every month and follow @sciencefocusQA on Twitter for your daily dose of fun science facts.