Salt how is it formed

The name of a salt has two parts. The first part comes from the metal, metal oxide or metal carbonate. The second part comes from the acid. You can always work out the name of the salt by looking at the reactants:. For example, if potassium oxide reacts with sulfuric acid, the products will be potassium sulfate and water.

The table shows some more examples:. Note that ammonia forms ammonium salts when it reacts with acids. Very high quality education on a hugely underreported subject. The oceans are vital to our lives and we need to know more about them. This course helps set the scene. Category: FutureLearn Local. Category: FutureLearn Local , Learning.

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You can unlock new opportunities with unlimited access to hundreds of online short courses for a year by subscribing to our Unlimited package. Build your knowledge with top universities and organisations. Learn more about how FutureLearn is transforming access to education. Learn more about this course. Where does the salt come from? Rivers and rain are major inputs to the oceans, but they are freshwater not salty. Dr Will Homoky explains where the ocean gets its salt from.

View transcript. And this chemical weathering occurs on the surface of the land and underground, where water percolates through the cracks and the gaps in the soils and rocks. Eventually this water emerges and it flows to the ocean as rivers, carrying with it a cocktail of chemical constituents that enter the oceans over many millions of years. Now, the composition of rocks that dissolve on land are not all the same.

In fact, rocks vary between regions in their composition and have done throughout Earth history. We do know that rivers contain only a tiny amount of salt, just a pinch compared to ocean waters.

In fact, they contain just parts per million in these waters. And these salts are slightly different to ocean waters too. These ions combine and form water. After the water forms, the sodium and chlorine ions remain dissolved and the acid and base are said to be neutralized. Solid salt is formed when the water evaporates and the negatively charged chlorine ions combine with the positively charged sodium ions.

Solid sodium chloride exists in the form of tiny, cube-shaped particles called crystals. These crystals are colorless, have a density of 2. They also dissolve in water, separating into the component sodium and chlorine ions.

This process known as ionization is important to many industrial chemical reactions. Common salt sodium chloride is found throughout nature. It is dissolved in the oceans with an average concentration of 2. On land, thick salt deposits, formed by the evaporation of prehistoric oceans, are widely distributed.