• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Our Planet Is Getting Saltier And That’s Very Bad News

November 29, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Our world is becoming increasingly salty and according to a new study, it’s all down to human activity. As a result of this saline shift, the chemistry of our rivers is being radically altered, impacting the quality of our water and affecting human health.

The planet has a natural “salt cycle” in which geologic and hydrologic processes, such as the weathering of rocks and minerals, bring salts to Earth’s surface over long periods of time. 

Advertisement

However, in recent decades, humans have massively accelerated this cycle through mining and land development, unearthing salt and bringing it to the surface way faster than natural processes.

In turn, the concentration of salt ions has substantially increased in streams and rivers over the last 50 years, while human-caused salinization has impacted approximately 1 billion hectares (2.5 billion acres) of soil around the world. 

“Twenty years ago, all we had were case studies. We could say surface waters were salty here in New York or in Baltimore’s drinking water supply. We now show that it’s a cycle—from the deep Earth to the atmosphere—that’s been significantly perturbed by human activities,” Gene Likens, study co-author and an ecologist at the University of Connecticut and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, said in a statement. 

Diagram showing the The natural salt cycle of Earth.

The natural salt cycle.

Image credit: S S Kaushal et al/Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 2023

When scientists talk about salt, they’re not just describing sodium chloride, the white stuff sprinkled on food. In the terminology of chemists and geologists, a salt is any chemical compound consisting of an ionic assembly of positively charged cations and negatively charged anions. 

Advertisement

“When people think of salt, they tend to think of sodium chloride, but our work over the years has shown that we’ve disturbed other types of salts, including ones related to limestone, gypsum, and calcium sulfate,” added Professor Sujay Kaushal, lead author of the study.

The proliferation of salt is likely to have an array of detrimental impacts on the environment and human health. One of the chief concerns is water quality. Salt ions can bind to contaminants in soils and sediments, forming “chemical cocktails” that circulate in the environment and can end up in water supplies. 

A diagram of the anthropogenic salt cycle of Earth.

The anthropogenic salt cycle.

Image credit: S S Kaushal et al/Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 2023

Even the air isn’t safe from rapid salinization. When lakes dry up – an increasingly common reality due to climate change – it can kick up plumes of salty dust into the atmosphere. The researchers explain that this too is likely to have a negative impact on human health.

A major source of the problem is salt sprayed on icy roads during the cold months. In the US, this represents 44 percent of salt consumption and accounts for almost 14 percent of the dissolved solids that enter the country’s rivers.

Advertisement

Part of the solution might be to cut back on the amount of salt put on roads during the winter. However, as the researchers acknowledge, this runs the risk of increasing the number of road traffic accidents.

“There’s the short-term risk of injury, which is serious and something we certainly need to think about, but there’s also the long-term risk of health issues associated with too much salt in our water. It’s about finding the right balance,” Kaushal said. 

“This is a very complex issue because salt is not considered a primary drinking water contaminant in the US, so to regulate it would be a big undertaking,” Kaushal added. 

“But do I think it’s a substance that is increasing in the environment to harmful levels? Yes.” 

Advertisement

The study is published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Paris ramps up security as jihadist attacks trial starts
  2. Cricket-‘Western bloc’ has let Pakistan down, board chief says
  3. Ancient Bison Found In Permafrost Is So Well Preserved Scientists Want To Clone It
  4. Where Inside Us Do We Feel Love?

Source Link: Our Planet Is Getting Saltier And That's Very Bad News

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version