🚀 go-pugleaf

On 30 Sep 2001 10:50:01 -0700, benny_patrick@hotmail.com (Fabrikant)
wrote:

Poor Fabby, still struggles with a grade school problem. 
The simple answer - evaporation has over the eons left the sea salty
relative to the `fresh' water of terrestrial rivers and lakes which
originate from rainfall and snowfall each year from atmospheric mists
that to some extent originated as evaporation from the sea. Take you
jugs and can pickles.  Among a few of the more obvious things you have
forgotten to consider: the solubility of terrestrial salts,
temperature, the incredible time involved and the number of water
cycles that the earth has been through. Some lakes are also very salty
if they are exposed only to rain and evaporation. What were the
conditions on earth in the past far beyond our own fleeting presence?
Don't struggle with it, you will leave the impression that you are
dumb and it is always better for people to only wonder about that. If
you want to ponder, climb to the highest mountain peak you can scale
and collect marine (ocean) fossils. Then if you are curious study
Geology.


>  The writer referred to a professor from an Ivy League university.
Not always the best place to look for answer. 

>I like this experiment.  I suggest to expand it as follows: to have
>two jars, one kept always full, and the other kept half-full.  Since
>the rate of evaporation is proportional to the area
and numerous other factors
> it will be the
>same for both jars, but the half-full jar will obviously become with
>time more salty than the full one, because proportionally, greater
>part of it will be evaporated.
Except if you started with the same water the full jar started with
twice as much salt as the half full jar
> If this model is applicable to an
>ocean, it should be applicable to any lake fed by a river. 
Why lakes have astronomically higher turn over rates relative to the
ocean. two entirely different things other than the presence of water
>ince lakes
>on average are much more shallow, than the ocean, the lake water
>should be much more salty than it is in the oceans, which we know to
>be wrong: majority of lakes are not salty at all.  The only logical
>conclusion: the jug experiment is not applicable to oceans.
Can pickles
>We know that all rivers bring pollution to the oceans, and the ocean
>pollution is much stronger close to the river delta, and is much less
>far away from it.
where on earth did you come up with this malarkey? if you consider
erosion and water bourn silt as `pollution' then the delta _is_
pollution, otherwise the slow flow through the delta would have a
cleansing effect like running water anywhere. some rivers empty into
seas far from habitation, are they polluted? Your rationalizations are
becoming a bore, the method is not valid, suggest a scientific
approach - get a boat, establish a grid, sample the water at
intervals, analyse the samples, tabulate your empirical observations
and devise a theory to explain them. You have the cart before the
horse. warning: even a tiny area such as Strait of Florida may take
years to get sufficient data for even a preliminary evaluation of
results - on the other hand, you know it is presently salty so why
bother?

>he same should be true for salt, if it were rivers
>bringing salt to the oceans: the water should be more salty close to
>the river delta and less salty far away.  Again, we know, that quite
>opposite is true.
nonsense - all this and you have yet to analyse your first river
sample for salt and other contents.
>Some arithmetic is useful. 
only if you have some valid observational data to analyse, otherwise
it is mathematical masturbation
>If you compute the amount of water,
>brought to the oceans by all rivers, and divide it by the total amount
>of water in the oceans, you will get a number much smaller, than the
>same quotient for a lake.  This is why lakes are usually more polluted
>than oceans.  Again, if rivers bring salt to the oceans, they also
>bring salt to the lakes, and lakes should have been much more salty,
>than oceans, which is not true.  I rest my case.
Rest in peace and return to school to learn something about the
scientific approach and the fairly well established principles - you
are presently wandering beyond the looking glass with Alice. Advice,
do some thinking on your own without relying on Ivy League professors
- in some circles the title `professor' is reserved for the piano
player in a whore house.
>Fabrikant
Professor
>P.S. If you wish to see more material written by me, send an E-mail to
>hollyric@colba.net, and you will be given the name of my web site on
>the condition that you do not post it.  If you have doubts about the
>authenticity of any posting, send your inquiry to the same address,
>and you will get a confirmation or a denial.