How much salt is there in the Dead Sea?
The Dead Sea is one of the saltiest natural bodies of water on Earth. The special salt has been used in beauty products for thousands of years, but there's little chance of it running out!
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?
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Authors
Luis trained as a zoologist, but now works as a science and technology educator. In his spare time he builds 3D-printed robots, in the hope that he will be spared when the revolution inevitably comes.
