Dolores Jean Bucco, age 13, of Loudonvil N.Y., for her question;

What makes the ocean salty?

A robbery story usually ends in capture and the criminals are put safely behind bars. But the biggest robbery story in the world goes on unchecked day and night. The criminals are well known, but they will never be put behind bars. For they arc; the little streams and rivers that seep through the soil and gush over the stones. They have robbed the land of billions of tons of salts and dumped the loot into the sea.

This robbery began a couple of billion years ago. The first climate on earth was horrible. The ground was bare and barren of all living things. Torrents of rain fell ceaselessly from the glowering skies. It pelted the new made ground and gushed over the jagged rocks. The first streams and rivers rushed down the slopes to pour their waters into the deep ocean basins.

Running water, they say, can wear away the hardest stone. And so it can. Its greedy little tongues are always eager to dissolve the softer materials in the rocks. This weakens the hardest stones. They crack, chip and break into fragments. The running water laps at the rough edges and dissolves them until they are smooth.

All these dissolved chemicals are toted along by ‑the thirsty water. It always carries a big load of salts, because these chemicals are most easily dissolved. But, in smaller amounts, almost all the other elements are also dissolved and toted along in the running water. The loot includes calcium, cobalt and even metals such as copper, silver and gold.

All this plunder is taken by the big rivers and emptied into the sea. In the beginning, the sea water was only slightly salty. But salts and other chemicals increased as the. rivers endlessly emptied their loot‑laden waters. Imagine a tank of seawater a mile square and a mile high. In that cubic mile there is about 133 million tons of ordinary salt plus about 33 million tons of other chemical salts. There is also 93 million dollars worth of dissolved gold and over 8 million dollars worth of silver plus various  quantities of some 50 other elements.

A little of the salt is tossed nigh on ocean waves and carried off by the air. It floats aloft, helping to gel raindrops. But most of it stays in the sea. It is too heavy to join the rising vapor as the sun evaporates tho surface of the water, So, the sea is getting saltier all the time. Every day the little streams gurgle along with their looted chemicals dissolved from the ground. Every day the rivers add more and more plunder to the sea ‑‑ and nobody can do a thing to stop this greatest of all robberies,