We Discovered a New Natural Cycle!
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- So we all know about the carbon cycle, and the water cycle, and maybe even the nitrogen cycle. But new research has figured out there's a salt cycle, too. Problem is, that same research has found that we already broke it. Here's what that means and how we can fix our broken salt cycle!
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The Aral Sea didn't just dry up. The soviets bled it dry to irrigate cotton and only stopped when the salt killed the cotton.
If by "stopped" you mean "stopped existing", then yeah, otherwise, the countries that inherited the cotton fields and irrigation systems still use it and even depend on the income from the cotton. And it's going to blow in the entire region's faces relatively soon...
Y'know, that's such a fantastic claim that I had to look it up...
Thanks for reminding me that a person can learn something new every day
Suprised they didn’t truck it to the sea
Classic Soviets...
@@gracequach6769 Almost like they were just capitalists in bad masks LOL
This is why interdisciplinary interaction should be encouraged on campuses, in business, & in the field.
You’ve got it.
Okay I have some problems with this video because this was absolutely a thing that was discussed 20 years ago when I was in school, but we did not call it a cycle because we did not understand how the full thing worked. We knew it must exist, but it wasn't formalized into a cycle because we did not know how the salt exactly made it to back up onto land outside of you know continental shifting and uplifts. I cannot help but notice that that part of the cycle is not explained here which really leads me to the question of why did we suddenly declare that we understand it fully as a cycle when that piece of information is clearly still missing. The whole reason it wasn't declared before was because we were missing the information, somebody just deciding to start calling it that does not actually make it valid. I was really expecting to learn something from this video but it actually has less information in it than what we talked about while I was in school. I really want to know what paper was claiming to make a big discovery here.
@@darcieclements4880 I think it is mostly news coverage and the fact that this paper is a synthesis one. That there is a cycle should be extremely obvious to basically anyone who thinks about it. Even a basic search only looking for 'salt cycle' papers finds multiple papers discussing it that predate it. 2013 if we are being strict is the first one that talks about salts in general and the global scale, but there was also one in 1995 that discusses specific salts.
Ultimately, I think the problem is sensationalism. Actual scientists have thought about and described the 'salt-cycles' for a long time. It is true that it doesn't get as much media coverage and thought by normal people as other cycles, but that doesn't mean that it is new to actual experts.
I study environmental science and at least in my uni it is encouraged. I think it is definitely a trend in general. However, after you're out of academia what really drives what gets studied, is limited by private interest that finance the studies. Studies financed by public money, or studies that can completely leave aside corporate interest are each day less and less. And that affects multidisciplinarism, if we can call it that
Everything this channel says is half truth and manipulation......
Wake up fools
I thought the salt cycle was first discovered on internet comment forums.
I thought about recently and i assumed it was something known. Like, how no one though about how the minerals in rivers end up there if they are slowly washed off in the ocean?
the jerk cycle
Obcjection xD
@@ryaneylee I think you mean jerk circle
Don’t get salty with us !
How was this not a thing earlier? Grew up with wetlands next to our house, on a heavily salted state road. The water used to be fairly clear, and we even had an endangered turtle species lay eggs in our yard one year. Now the water is green, slimy, and murky, and we’ve never seen those turtles again. We used to go ‘adventures’ through the wetlands, and now it’s so nasty I don’t think we would ever be allowed to 😢
I suspect it's one of the cases where people might've noticed some effects and maybe even anecdotally linked them to salt, but there were no formal scientific studies looking into it. A bit like how we've seen the effects of pollution in big cities long before we started having conversations about climate change or the negative effects of polluted air on human health.
Blame the beavers
the US government has a document describing the salt cycle from 1993 they concluded that they should research further into its environmental impacts and that they think that there should not be any impact.
the document is called "The Material Flow of Salt" and its the last paragraph talks about the environment
It's a combination of salt, gas runoffs, pesticide and fertilizer runoff (from both agricultural and residential origin). I think as a community you need to get together and find the local source, and begin some mitigation actions such as encouraging native species of reed in some locations to help natural filtration..It depends on your wetland context, but there are amazing intelligent people who can help you. They don't need to be government affiliated.
Roadsalt is not needed. In mid and northern Alaska, roads are not salted. The snow and ice are needed to protect pipes and things underground. We drive around just fine. Gravel is sometimes used, but not everywhere. People just need to chill and drive a bit slower in winter.
alaska is cold and stays cold so the ice stays ice and your gravel method works just fine. Here in the northeast you can have huge temperature swings just in the day as well as day to day. So The gravel method does not work because it just heats up and melts into the ice and then the ice just freezes back over top. You also dont have the industry of the lower 48 which ultimatly makes life possible in alaska to the level it has there. So we need the roads to run at full capacity or things truly start to not get done.
@@zachmoyer1849Well.. Do we need industry to keep going as strong though?
No seriously do we really need to. Our productivity per person is up tenfold from the 1950's maybe its time we took a step back collectivly and re-evaluate.
And I admit here that actual productivity over the entire nation and across all industries is very difficult to measure, especially when you get to software engineering.
I am just going off my industry that has hard physics based limits (I.E. some process have to be done by hand to keep heat and energy away from the workpeice, sometimes more horsepower is not a good thing) so I have a pretty strong indicator that computers have had simular results for other industries.
@@AnonymousAnarchist2 still need to move all the things around to make what we make. It does not matter if production per person has gone up you still need to move product a from factory a to factory B to make product B and then distribute product B to the entire globe the coasts are hubs for finishing products and if we lower production in those areas more remote places would suffer.
Just imagine how many extra cars can be sold when they are corroded by salt. Mt. Hood uses 26000lbs of salt a day to keep their terrain park riding decent. The point where economic and environmental incentives meet. Grew up driving before my region salted, and was used to white roads, common sense and braking early. I hear the sahara used to be green, too... I hope we aren't sprinting towards a "Cadillac Desert"
@@zachmoyer1849 Your kind of missing the point. If we are 10 times more productive... then work 2 months out of the year and take the rest off. We dont *need* to be doing any of it, we just are out of habit at this point
The Aral Sea is a well understood problem. Soviet industrial style irrigation for a cash crop, followed by successor states governing the sea, one trying to protect it, with the other not caring more about a large need for fresh water, has resulted in an inland sea that kept the arid center of a continent remarkably lush, becoming a poisoned desert dust-bowl, shortening the livelihood and lives of anyone living near it. It can happen anywhere there isn’t a state level program to look after what even looks like robust resources.
The Tragedy of the Commons
And now in Australia they're running a sequel of it :D
Gotta love quick profit cotton!
literally poisoned too, considering there was some toxic waste dumping iirc, and biological weapons testing on a *former* island in the lake
Yes, a state-run program to look after a State created problem.
I would love to hear about state that doesn't care about water here, when wars almost fought over it. And if sarcasm flew over, to the point - it's not about the sea, it's about water, you could collect it from rivers. The sea itself just the symbol.
Northern Ontario tends to use sand instead of salt for the roads. In part because it's often too cold for the salt to actually do anything. So, more reliable and less environmentally sketchy.
The same thing happens in Australia, because snow only falls on the road every 3 or 4 years.
Is there a sand cycle??
@@oriontigley5089
I suppose their could be.
Sand gets eroded from stone by wind and weather, gets washed into the sea where it's further chiseled away. It then lands on the ocean floor, eventually under high pressure going back into rock?
Next month: "We broke the Sand Cycle"
@@ScionStorm1 Go look for articles about there not being enough sand for use!
In the UK our roads are smothered in Salt every winter and have always wondered the consequences of that.
The plants and animals in the soil having to deal with all that salt runoff.
Well, what is interesting is that in the Netherlands, multiple coast plants which are adapted to salty soils started to spread along the high ways and roads separating from them.
Aka finding beachplants next to the highways may not be super uncommon.
And if they start to like the soil there it means all local native plants are probably starting to die out because they can't handle the salt
One animal it might affect is the domestic dog. They can die from some types of algal overgrowth they drink or breath in. Some die from it. I'm pretty sure I remember that a dog died in the UK from it at least once recently.
Depending on the road, the salt runoff will just enter the drain and eventually get filtered out into the ocean as part of the water filtration process.
salt-hardy plants are making their way inland. if it ends up being a problem, fungi will encapsulate it given time.
@@safebox36 Yeah; but this is the same place that still thinks it's ok to drain sewage into their rivers so, maybe your point is invalid?
Honestly with the way the Earth is facing a sand crisis, we may need to look into how we can preserve the cycle of the creation of sand on our planet. Because we've already messed up that cycle too.
@@RiverRat_1977 Well It sounds like some places are getting excess sodium chloride.
I expect Sodium-ion batteries to be a bit of a game changer over the next decade.
Next... lithium balances will be seriously diminished everywhere they exist in quantities profitable enough to extract it!! Cities that have higher concentrations of lithium salts in groundwater tend to have lower rates of bipolar disorders, whereas cities with low levels of lithium salts tend to have higher rates of bipolar disorders... I'm not trying to shame anyone who is afflicted with bipolar disorder or depression, but I hope places that are extracting large quantities of lithium for battery production are doing so in a way that doesn't completely deplete lithium and other salts that provide some medicinal benefits via groundwater used for drinking... We've got enough health issues directly related to industry.. and their negligent dumping of toxic chemical waste byproducts into the ground Ex: Love Canal!! Also, extremely low levels of some naturally occurring salts found in our drinking water have been related to certain bone and health problems.. and even higher crime rates.
@@RiverRat_1977 Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I often relate nutrition to good or bad (helpful or harmful) chemicals in and out. Chemistry everywhere, and we need it in balance.
This is why Seattle doesn't salt roads in our occasional snowstorms. It's bad for the salmon, and we need them more than we need office workers showing their faces for a few days, or even a couple of weeks. So it's plowing and sand only.
It's different in the mountains, of course. There, you either get the roads de-iced or have to buy a snowmobile.
yeah but you all can get away with it since its just one or two days a year and the snow is never deep enough to actually be undrivable. Cant do that where the snow is actually substantial.
I wish that more counties would adopt that though, salmon are one thing but they are not in too much risk of going extinct since so many places make a big deal about them. I am actually much more worried about other fish that are less tolerant of salts, salmon have an ok time coping with it but not all the fish do.
The Chehalis river basin is the only place in the world where you can find the Olympic mudminnow and that fish has few protections and no one cares about it, that combined with its small and heavily developed range means its at real risk. Populations in Olympia and Grays Harbor are all very much threatened by everything pouring into the rivers and unlike salmon dont have humans helping them get through it.
Its the organisms we dont pay attention too that I am worried about
That's just wrong, compacted snow makes decent driving surfaces, deicing is mostly benefitial in freezing rain and other black ice scenarios. If you have snow to drive snowmobiles you should also have snow for proper winter roads as we call them in Sweden.
@@roevhaal578 Yeah the thing that you are missing is that its in the US and the US is stupid. We just throw salt on the ground when its cold like idiots.
"Puget sound starts here"
Grew up in the Seattle area and there was lots of salt in our public school roads.
The city I live in treats the river like a free dump site... "They say its safe"... is their motto
She reminds me of my seventh grade science teacher. For the record, that is just about the highest praise I can give someone. My teacher opened my eyes to a big world.
Thank you
Yay for educators and life long learning
they*
This person is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.
My 7th grade teacher believed that people could get energy by staring at the sun and didn't need food if they did so
@@FinneasJedidiah...which state?
I just kind of assumed that a salt cycle was a thing intuitively, most of life needs some level of salts, and the fact that freshwater feeds into the saltwater ocean means that salt has to come from somewhere and go to somewhere, otherwise the salinity of the ocean would be on a constant decline
You truly are the the woman alive
In Norway they don´t salt, and they get a LOT of snow. They plow, and has laws about what kind of tires you need in wintertimes. It works very well...
Nitrogen cycle needs some love too.
Phosphate -> Nitrate -> Nitrite -> Carbon
The mercury cycle certainly needs some attention, if not love.
@@pattheplanter What does mercury do?
@@brianhowe201 ua-cam.com/video/80KJ9gqHrYo/v-deo.html&ab_channel=UnitedNations
Kinda looks like a dead end when you stop at not the beginning
PO4^2- -> NO3^- -> NO^- -> C ?
At what point are we making gold out of lead again?
For the benefit of those who may have been confused: Missoula is a city in Montana, USA
6:30 i mean technically speaking there's a 'natural cycle' for each and every single molecule used by life.
and we've only begun to scratch the surface of fungal networks that (it freaking seems!) are making a bunch of distant & 'cut off' resources available to nearby lifeforms.
also now i kinda feel like looking into every single cycle over fifty years.
I bet we could learn some really cool things along the way :D
Excellent thinking.
Fungi basically enabled life on land in Earth's past by turning dead inorganic regolith into bioavailable-nutrient-rich soil ready for the first plants. Maybe the real coup for exobiology would be to find fungi on Mars. Maybe we could even seed Mars with fungi to try to jumpstart an ecosystem on mars.
@@lozoft9 sadly martian regolith is self-sterilizing, and the planet's water is largely trapped in the rocks, so its not really viable to terraform at all.
Lithium mining is the biggest problem. Destroying fields with runoff, happens because of synthetic fertilisers.. we had an organic system and big companies broke it.
Those who didn't want to used them now have to because of runoff from neighbouring farms.
Nerd Note:
0:53 to 1:06
What you are showing are molecules. Salts are crystalline structures, meaning that there is no "exchange" of electrons (as in molecules) but rather an attraction (electrostatic force) between the charged atoms (ions).
There is definitely an exchange of electrons in ionic bonds the electron is simply fully given up rather than shared
*me, listening to this episode on autoplay while cooking, suddenly literally pausing midway through to look at the scoop of kosher salt in my hand*
Don't worry, eating salt was never the issue. We've used salt to season food for millenia.
Pouring truckloads of salt and fertilizer onto roads and fields is a recent issue brought about by our massive industry and it's wrecking our ecosystems.
"Started drying up" is possibly the understatement of the year for how the Soviets ratfucked that section of the world.
Speedrunning the climate crisis
Speedrunning the great filter
Womp womp
This is worth getting salty about it. Full tilted.
we are literally salting our own earth... Carthage had to be defeated by rome first and be forced to have their earth salted...
You mean the *climate grift
I am quite astonished that the Salt Cycle was just discovered, because when I was in school 40 years ago, it was clear already that salt runs in cycles. Maybe it helps if you grown up above so many layers of salts as if an ocean as deep as 40 miles was vaporized, and only the salt left. In geography classes, it was taught how the salt was deposited about 220 million years ago. I remember how, as a homework, I was coding a small program on my Commodore 64 to print out the different layers of salt, from Alum and Magnesium sulfate via potassium chloride up to table salt. So I wonder, what did I miss back then, when it only now is described as a cycle, when at the time, I was printing out six cycles of salt deposits?
Indeed. When I knew that in the USA they throw salt to the roads (years ago) I thought, "where all that salt goes afterwards?"
The answer is not unexpected... 😔
This is so cool. I remember asking as a kid. Where does all the salt go, why hasn't the ocean become more salty in billions of years? There was no answer.
We could utilize what they do in japan to prevent road icing, using warm water to melt and prevent freezing on the roads
This is some of the best comedy I have seen in a while. You people who are bound and determined to scare yourselves to death keep coming up with more and more bizarre ways. Such vivid imaginations. LMAO!!!
When a positive ion and a negative ion really love each other...
Salt baby is born
Occasionally, it's two & one. Freaky.
When millions of positive ions and millions of negative ions love each other, they end in a huge heap, sticking to all their neighbours.
@@pattheplanter PARTY TIME!!! 🤣🤣🤣
@@AccidentalNinja
oh boy, now let me tell you about coordinative bonds...
Far beneath the sediment & rock floor of the current *Mediterranean Sea,* there are huge Salt (mostly *Sodium Chloride)* deposits which have formed in layers that are over a *_KILOMETER_* thick in places!
I know I am a horrible *that person* for saying this, because it doesn’t matter in the slightest for the topic at hand, but your animations portray salts as neutral molecules, when they in fact (for the most part) stay ionic compounds in solid form and do not form covalent bonds. I know that’s not what you’re talking about, but my god is it distracting to me personally
Same, I feel like things like that are important if you're already going through the steps to animate it.
Preach!
This is actually very interesting and informative
Following their definition of salts, even water would be a salt, as a combination of hydrogen and hydroxide ions...
The actual name of this channel should be "middle school scishow" based on how they oversimplify and/or just get stuff wrong. I've finally come to realize that that is OK though, on account of that's probably their target audience.
My favorite natural movement of salt are the lava lamp-like diapirs slowly working their way to the surface.
"Doomsday comes earlier every year" has been in my head all morning. I know why now! Lol
Bc this channel has am out of control doomsday / '& it's our fault' kink
Road salt disrupted farming when I was young, in the Boston area.
"But the earth is so big, and we are so tiny."
....
I challenge you to find a single place that hasn't been tainted by humans leaving their trash wherever the hell they feel like.
Lice are small too, but if you get enough of em on you, you absolutely feel their impact on your head.
but... Brawndo has what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.
I learned about this 20 years ago from the movie Day after Tomorrow. It's hard to believe we have just found out about it lol
The greatest anthropogenic disturbance to the salt cycle must be League of Legends, no doubt.
The solution to road salt is walkable cities. If people don’t need to drive everywhere, we don’t need nearly as much road salt.
I like the Bi-cycle
Lmao same
if you like that one, wait till you see the tri-cycle
Riding the bisexual
As a bisexual, I like cycling as well
As a bisexual, I like cycling around hell as well
I think the most important lesson from this video is that just looking in one area in one way doesn’t give a complete picture. We need to collaborate more between professional fields.
simply: yup.
5:38...thought it was AI.
At 5:39 the index finger lines up perfectly with the thumb and looks like the person has 3 fingers.
She was so good at explaining frustrating things in a respectful way, I enjoyed how intelligent and honest but kind she was. Well done video in both content and delivery 😊
I just always assumed, I mean salt comes out of rocks and precipitates onto the sea floor and gets made back into rocks again. I literally made this connection years ago and you are telling me that science just now caught one? I feel like it was just so obvious everyone assumed it was already discovered or something.
Everybody knew their little part of it, it was just not studied in its totality.
You're not allowed to be as smart as you are. Leave some room for the researchers please!
Yup. The things we average folk can easily observe require quantification to be recognized and then to one day be addressed. I wonder what would happen if we trusted intuition and basic observation more? But we can’t trust the public to think correctly unless one wears a lab coat, a suit, or has friends in high places. I wonder who and how this serves.
@@zeddybear257 Actually in some fields most discoveries are made by amateurs, its not like science is gate kept its just most people dont care and it takes a lot of evidence AKA enough people to care for something to be recognized. One person who notices or assumes something isnt going to be able to confirm it or get it out to a wider audience very easily.
Some fields like taxonomy are incredibly poor fields if your aim is to make money so amateurs are extremely important.
There are 250,000+ described beetles, do you really think people are paid to discover more beetles? There is no money in discovering beetles so people have to be passionate about it and the number of people with the passion and resources to classify more beetles is pretty low.
What the real problem is that the average person doesnt know how to access the proper channels because science is a lot of work and if there isnt any money in something its hard to justify its research. Regular people are instrumental in certain sciences, for example am app like iNaturalist can be incredibly helpful in the study of life because life is so vast and diverse no one scientist could ever hope to see it. It allows regular people to just take pictures of plants, animals, and other life they find which can help see how common they are in an area and even find previously unknown populations of species.
@@Exquailibur yes, I’m well aware that I don’t need for everything to be quantified for me to know what’s true. I have excellent observation skills, intuition and evaluation and a fully functioning internal compass. It takes time for many of us to develop this, I grew up in nature. I also like to read about studies done for comparison. I would not have known about the willows were it not for this. Can’t know everything even if I know about many things.
That’s why we use cinders(dark pumice grit for the uninitiated)
My brain was totally derailed at about 5:40 with the 'stock photo' image of an alien three-fingered hand.
Are you and I the only people who saw that? What was going on there?!!?
Speedrunning extinction any%
(22300 years)
I live in a snowy area of California and we don't salt the roads. They put down crushed volcanic rock that mixes together with the ice and helps provide traction
I lived in the Salt Lake City area for 50 years, and the airborne salt because of the drying lake bed is a real problem. There, you can literally see the salt migrate out of the lake through dust storms. I moved away 3 years ago. I'm not going to suffer it.😮
I’m pretty sure this won’t get seen but in an effort to reduce salt and other runoffs into lake Tahoe from road deicing, a group was formed and has put in a large amount of mitigation to help bring those sediments and salts into areas such as settling ponds before they could reach the lake and rivers and streams where it is then recovered once dry.
I know about a case where fertilizer led to tipping of a lakes ecosystem.
Fertilizer were washed from overfertilized fields into rivers which ultimately lead to a lake. The fertilizer caused huge algae growth which made the fish population explode because of the abbundance of food.
Turns out there where so many fish that they eradicated all of the algae and ended up drowning themselves because there were no oxygen producing organisms left…
Im from Western Australia and we have been dealing with salinification of agricultural areas from water table issues, so the very fact that ANYONE would pour tons of salt onto their land to thaw roads is insane to me
Salting roads is the most unnecessary source of salt pollution. It is outlawed in some places, like CA, and they just plow the snow and put chains on their tires when necessary. And yes, some places in CA get lots of snow, like around Lake Tahoe.
"Don't be so Salty"
Sorry, It's just a Cycle...
Wake up tired
Salty
Can't sleep because salty
😔🔄
quebec (canada) is further north than most US city (excluding alaska). and since at least 2005, we only really only spray salt when temperatures are below -15°C (or on the main highways). generally its only gravel or a mix of gravel and salt.
(with various ratio depending on the current/forecasted temperature, also swapping to calcium salt when it drops below -20°C because sodium chlorine stops working)
The hand attached to the arm in the blood pressure stock footage at 5:36 looks like it only has 4 fingers.
I think it may just be an illusion due to how the person is holding their hand relative to the camera.
maybe AI?
Nah, SciShow wouldn't use AI imagery without identifying it first. I think it's just an optical illusion from the camera position.
Reverse osmosis/desalination is also a big contributing factor to the destabilization of the salt cycle..
Weird, I've known about this for years, always assumed it was a known thing since we knew the road salt was bad and saltwater aquarists will generally know where the salts in the ocean come from. The rest of it is just stringing together the, seemingly, obvious in a scientific paper.
5:39 only 4 fingers on that there hand!
So twitter?
I actually remember wondering about extracting salt from sewage systems for economic reasons a few years ago, glad to see I wasn’t going completely insane
You are so funny Savannah! I didn't expect a salt cycle video to be so entertaining! Great work. This is why we love SciShow ❤
5:37 is... is this AI footage??
No, the pointer finger is hidden behind the thumb. if you change playback feed to .5 you can see a sliver of the pointer finger
@@theantichrist5191this was driving me crazy, thank you
AI footage would probably have fingers dynamically appearing and disappearing 😂
@@ZrJiri or just extra weird shaped fingers
@@theantichrist5191 oh I see it now! That was really weird how obscured it was even with motion
If you lower the resolution quality to 240p och 144p you get a nice early 90s retro feeling from the new SciShow studio.
Chew on this one .if humans are essentially bags of water . We each carry about 100lbs of water . Times 8 billion . That seems like a lot of fresh water to remove from the cycle
its roughly a cubic mile of water call it two for good measure. Lake superior is 2900 cubic miles of fresh water so more evaporates off the surface of one lake than the entirety of all the water in human bodies.
i just started experimenting with cooking and realize each type of salt can make each food taste different especially the granual size, and i also found my favorite salt of all time that can make paper taste good "Mediterranean sea salt" and i went to the grocery store and they had everytype but they were all out of MSS. I asked where are they and they said they dont know where new ones are comming. I NEED THAT SALT but seeing this video now makes me realize we indeed got to slow down the salt processing.
5:30 We don’t filter salt out of ground water. It can’t be filtered out, since it is dissolved. It is either removed by distillation or by reverse osmosis. This can be done on highly saline water, so salt ingress is not a drinking water concern.
It can be removed with filters, just need micro and nanoscale filters. As or more expensive than distillation since it typically takes a stupid number of filters to get it below a drinkable threshold.
In Michigan the salts on the roads cause rust and erosion, faster on vehicles, than in the south. It's considered on trade in vehicles. . . Do a video on sand mining on great lakes. Non renewable resource with poor regulations and poor monitoring. Our sand... they're taking our sand 😢
Side note, not all sand is the same. Rocky, silica, coral, etc.
Could have asked me I knew that. That's why using salt against snow and ice in Germany is only allowed in special cases
We didn't break the salt cycle. We just turned it up to 11.
So the cycle that completes when the sea floor is a mountain.... Yeah, what happens when "nature likes" to cool down and stops moving tectonic plates around? Zomg a cycle lasting 200 million, possibly billion years! Let me guess we will "mess up" the asteroid cycle by stopping an asteroid from hitting earth.... 😂
I think when a natural cycle is messed with by human activity that definitely counts as breaking it 😅
No, we actually broke it:
We substantially sped up one section of the circle, but not the rest of it - so now it's more like a spiral, not a circle anymore, on a global scale. And even a very distorted spiral in many smaller areas.
Thus, we're shifting further and further away from the previous equilibrium state.
As someone who's brand is very salt associated, im glad there is a cycle for salt (tbh I thought there always was, just no one mentioned it much at all, like it was a sub-cycle for the rock or water cycle) and also miffed at humanity for doing a human civilization and mucking up with it.
Another great episode. Love this presenter, too! But the best part of this one was when they posed the question, "What else don't we know?" What don't we know, indeed. Our greatest error of modernity is the hubris we maintain that we actually know much of anything at all. We broke everything-and continue to break everything-because we are acting out of a profound ignorance masquerading as deep understanding. I mean, I do love science, but it needs to learn to be less enamored of itself and drunk on its own power.
One positive I've seen in the past decade or so is the move to a salt SOLUTION as opposed to rock. There's less waste, and roadwater generally ends up in sewers not on permeable surfaces where you're trying to grow grass.
Mineral rich salt for building materials, carbon sequestration, energetic chemicals and industrial uses from ocean water in combination with evaporation and cavitation is ideal at many desert locations comparable to Salton Sea, Death Valley, Laguna Salada, Qattara Depression or Denakil Depression could be filled with gravity fed ocean water.
I really hate all this pearl clutching. Everything is framed like it's an insurmountable catastrophic problem. Recognizing this system, the way it works, and the way we affect it are very important things. 5 minutes into the conversation some youtuber will just tell you we broke the cycle and humans bad, and bully's look at me now. Yawn
Yup. Its a good thing we noticed it. We learned something. The earth is older than we are and will be around long after we are gone. We’re not that special
Alongside the MIT discovery in April of evaporating water using just light and the Photo-Molecular effect, this adds to our understanding of our world and our ultimate ability to regulate and tune its natural processes while being able to provide for our growing population. Ultimately these will all be in our bag of tricks for terraforming other worlds whilst maintaining ours for our future generations.
*Looks at salt shaker on my desk*
"Dear god what have I done"
i would guess raising more local animals could be a beneficial mitigation to mining for the fertilizer since animals, especially ruminants, are good at fertilizing.
this honestly feels more like something we probably knew about but just ignored because we didn't think it would be a problem until it became a problem.
I think saying we never noticed is going a bit far since anyone who has asked the question of why the sea is salty and why it doesn't get more salty would get awareness of some kind of cycle. Our understanding of it is just recently being formalized.
Well, they don't salt the roads in Anchorage and they hardly even plow them. They just expect you to run it all down flat with your car over the course of weeks till it snows again.
the comment on the scientists who study salt in soil and fresh water reminds me of a saying, "when everyone reads their own page, they don't realise that they reading the same book"
5:52 Just use Pluyonium in your drinking water. Will save from electricity (the reduce in the bill depends on how many hours of light you have daily).
I can imagine nobody wants to deal with such uninteresting stuff and scientists are no exception here
Gonna be real, i had assumed it was already a thing my whole life and that i just never heard about it. It's just so obvious, right? Everything else that gets dissolved in water, including water, gets its own cycle. Hell, anything thay exists as or in a fluid gets its own cycle. It's kinda just how entropy works.
I have no idea why I thought that somebody had thought through where the salt goes after road deicing. Some part of me was like “it can’t be good to put so much salt in the ground, right?” but before I could really consider the problem, some other part of me shut it down with “surely they’ve thought of that.“ No. No, they hadn’t thought of that. Why would you ever think that?
They do some road salting here in SD, but they do a lot more spreading of sand and dirt on the roads. They save the salt spray (magnesium chloride) for the many dirt roads, to keep the dust down in the summer.
Road salting in San Diego?? I never thought you'd get freezing degrees down there. 😲
I know that having mild winters like you do makes salt MORE necessary (freeze-thaw cycles and all), but there are ways to use less salt. And I'm not just talking about beet brine or whatever, just the fact that cities (and private individuals) have a distressing tendency to use STRAIGHT SALT, (which isn't even being used in a useful way) instead of mixing it with something that'll give traction instead of just creating slush.
However, road (and sidewalk) salt is the only use that really makes it into the media here, so the other ways that we're disrupting the salt cycle hadn't crossed my mind until this video.
As a chemistry teacher who has to deal with information students find on the internet, please don’t draw lines (bonds) between ions! A line means a covalent bond where electron sharing occurs. Ions are attracted to each other because of their opposite charges, but do NOT share electrons.
You forgot the MOUNTAINS of salt mines that are being depleted for making EV batteries.
I feel like I knew there was a salt cycle, but I didn't know until now. It makes sense; I washed by bong out with rock salt once, and when I poured it out on the ground (I was camping), I was shocked at just how _much_ water water needed to dissolve everything. I decided that from then on, I'll stick to 99% Alcohol, bottle brushes, and environmentally-friendly dishwashing compound.
Why salt the road? When I was in Alaska they realized that salt was bad and switched to sand/gravel. Turned out it was even better than salt… less damaging to vehicles, better for wild life, made roads safer, was better for plant life near the roads.
Ive moved 16 tons this year Lol, every watersoftner in the country flushing 100s of pounds of salt down the drain every year. In water treatment we deal with salts with other salts, plastic beads with positive and negative ions that get charged and pull other ions out of solution
Sort of already knew about that here in Australia...the estimated salt blown onto our country is enormous and we really don't have the rivers to leach it back into the ocean
Yes, I think there should be something done to the inner parts of Australia waterwise. Like offset 0,1% of the annual budget to prepare a huge lake in the inner east region of Australia. It will take maybe 50 years or more, but the payback in more rainfall and huge agricultural opportunities will make it worth while.
Anybody else notice the hand at 5:37, is the finger missing or is that an AI clip?
Solution is simple, stop salting roads, cut back on salts in agriculture. Deal with icy roads and lower yields by improving tires/cars/planting more/etc.
I was taught about this in the 90s. "Rediscovered" feeling..
The South Sea in the Netherlands was turned into the IJssel Lake decades ago and scientists most definitely studied how it turned sweet. The fact that salt comes down river was known, they just couldn't figure out why that would make a lake sweet and a sea salty. I wonder if these scientists have an explanation for that.
Sulfur cycle, Methane Cycle, Oxygen Cycle, Radio Isotopes... etc
I don't oppose radium in my drinking water! I want superpowers!
we don't have road salt in most of europe, gravel is used instead.