SciShow Tangents - Oceans

Episode Date: February 25, 2020

Oceans: they cover 70% of the planet, but what do we really know about them? Like what’s with all the salt, huh? And just what is the difference between a ‘sea’ and an ocean anyway?! I have questions!This one has a real doozy of a Stefan poem. I cut out a lot of us interrupting him with raucous laughter!  Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Stefan: @itsmestefanchin Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Truth or Fail]Boat cloakhttps://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227101-500-explorers-dont-forget-your-inflatable-cloak/?ignored=irrelevanthttps://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/behind-the-scenes/blog/boat-cloak-or-cloak-boathttps://web.archive.org/web/20120425161825/http://resource.canadashistory.ca/media/pdf/34-4-Spr-955-p46-51.pdfhttps://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NENZC18511220.2.5Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Halkett_Boat_Cloak.jpgWater chairhttps://archive.org/details/watercurejournal12newy/page/1/mode/2upImages: https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/this-ridiculous-victorian-era-rocking-bath-wasnt-just-f-1515091109Modesty barrelhttps://www.messynessychic.com/2014/04/15/victorian-prudes-beachside-bathing-machines/https://www.researchgate.net/figure/1715-Lethbridges-diving-barrel-John-Lethbridge-1678-1759-of-Newton-Abbot-Devon_fig2_228397874https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-strange-and-wonderful-history-of-diving-suits-from-1262529336https://devonassoc.org.uk/devoninfo/john-lethbridge-and-his-diving-machine-1880/Image: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fit,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_470/18zb0i2fswtkxjpg.jpg[Fact Off]Pumice raftshttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dont-believe-the-hype-the-pumice-raft-wont-save-the-great-barrier-reef/https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145490/a-raft-of-rockhttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-05/dbnl-hxh052317.phphttps://www.npr.org/2019/08/25/754190347/giant-pumice-raft-floating-towards-australia-could-help-replenish-great-barrier-Albatross tracking systemhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/31/albatross-marine-poaching/https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/albatrosses-outfitted-with-gps-detect-illegal-fishing-vessels-180974054/[Ask the Science Couch]Salty oceanhttps://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/whysalty.htmlhttps://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/why-ocean-salty?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. And this week, as always, I'm joined by Stefan Chen. Mm-hmm. And 12 cups of coffee in my belly. What happened? Are you just sleepy? Yeah, I was a little sleepy.

What's your tagline? Really feeling malt flavor right now. Ah, I hear that. Sam Schultz is with us as well. Hello. What's your tagline? The big cheese. Mm.

Sari Riley is joining us as usual. Yes. Great's your tagline? The big cheese. Sari Riley is joining us as usual. Yes. Great elbow patches. Thank you. They came with the sweater. Sari, what's your tagline? Corn nut nightmares. Whoa. And I'm Hank Green. My tagline is cool ranch

Doritos. Every week here on Slash Your Tangents, we get together to try to amaze, one-up, and delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory. We're also playing to win. We award Sam Bucks from week to week, and we do what we can to stay on topic,

but if we do go on a tangent, which we are likely to do, the rest of the team has to decide whether that tangent was worth it, and if not, you get Dr. Sam Buck. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from... Me! Stefan!

The ocean is huge and fills me with wonder. It's got sharks, squid, crabs, and the puffer. And the deep-sea anglerfish, whose life is a bit tougher. Plus a whole lot of other wet life to discover. Looking out to the horizon, you might say the surface seems bare, but much of the action takes place under there. You could...

Let's get the running commentary. What do you got? That's a full rhyme. Wow, Stefan. You could submerge Mount Everest with a mile to spare. It's so deep that exploring it takes more than just air.

As you descend, animals start to change color, and at every depth you can find a cucumber. Down at the bottom are vessels lost by land lovers and hydrothermal vents, those geothermal pumpers. It may have provided the soup where life did begin,

and it keeps on supporting us by producing oxygen. We're really quite lucky that it's not all frozen, that wonderful wet blue thing in the ocean. Oh, no. You're going to see me after class. I like wet life. I like just saying it's the wet life.

The wet life. You know, we've got dry life and we've got wet life. It's the two kinds. Was there really a cucumber at every single level? I did, yes. At all levels of ocean depth, there are cucumbers. And even there are dry cucumbers, too. Up here, outside, too.

That is true. It's sort of a separate thing. Anyway, the topic isn't cucumbers. It's the oceans. Sari, what's an ocean? Apparently, there's a geographical definition but it seems very hand wavy people agree that ocean covers about 70 of the earth's surface and there's like one big continuous ocean with many different basins like the north pacific

south pacific atlantic indian ar Yeah. Basin meaning what exactly? I think like a separate dip in the ground. So there's some sort of ridge that separates them or continental mass or plate tectonics that have separated these oceans from each other. So it's not an arbitrary division or some of it is? It's probably fairly, it's a little bit arbitrary. Like you could definitely be like,

well, the Atlantic and the Pacific are not the same. Yeah. But then you're like, well. But look down here. They do kind of connect. Yeah. Yeah. And like oceans and seas kind of bleed together too.

Right. Where it's like, if it's the Baltic Sea is like, you're the ocean, buddy. I'm sorry. Gulf of Mexico. The ocean. Definitely the ocean. Yeah. And the Sargasso Sea is all

ocean. It's like surrounded by ocean on all sides. No land, because usually seas are surrounded by land partially. But it's just like a different ocean current and some different seaweed that are in this one spot of ocean. So they're like, that's a sea separate from the ocean.

It has a certain je ne sais quoi. It's a special little bit of the sea that is not the sea, it's the sea. It has a certain je ne sais quoi. It's a special little bit of the sea that is not the sea, it's the sea. That's my jacuzzi. Yeah, I don't know.

What else do you want to know? There are different depths of the ocean. So like the surface ocean is where sunlight can penetrate in. And so that's where a lot of like the

photosynthetic organisms float around. And then as you get deeper and deeper, it gets darker and darker. And the life changes and becomes more sparse. They eat a lot of garbage. So we learned in the poem.

It's all wet, though. They eat a lot of garbage as in like poop from everybody else. Yeah, it's called marine snow, which is like a very lovely way to describe a very gross thing. Poop and dead bodies. Yeah. Fluttering down like snowflakes. And the etymology of the word ocean is from the Greek, boy, can I not pronounce this, Okinos, which is the great stream encircling the Earth's disk.

That is beautiful. Yeah. So it's from like an idea that was sort of a cosmic idea that was not real. Right. Wrong about the shape of the Earth. Still nice. Yeah, and it makes sense that it's like, oh, I see. In a metaphorical way.

Yeah, it's sort of like, take the metaphor to make it the real thing. Also, if you were like a Greek philosopher staring out, it's like, ah, man, we're just surrounded by water. That's it. That's all there is. Yeah. I'm Greek. I can see it on all sides. And now it's time for Truth or Fail. One of our panelists has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but only one of those is the truth.

The other two are big fat lies. The rest of us have to figure out either by deduction or wild guess which is the true fact. Sari has three facts for us. What are they? Which of these inventions inspired by the oceans is real? So number one is a cloak to protect you from rain and wind that doubles as an inflatable boat as a more portable alternative to canoes and other boats. Number two, a chair with a basin for a seat that you fill with seawater and sit in to supposedly heal digestive issues or butt problems like hemorrhoids. So I just sit on a seat with ocean water in it. Yes.

But is there plastic between me and the seat? Or is my butt in the seawater? Your butt is in the seawater. Or number three, a light wooden barrel-like tube with armholes so people could preserve their modesty while men and women beach segregation laws were still a thing. So they would walk around in the barrels. Okay, first of all, before we we get into it we got three facts one you got a poncho that can

serve as an inflatable boat basically we got an alternative to canoes okay two we got a chair that you fill up with seawater to heal your butt problems three you got a barrel-like tube with armholes so that people could preserve their modesty during male-female beach segregation. Now, first of all, was there male-female beach segregation? Yeah, in at least the UK in the 1700s, 1700s, 1800s,

I think as far as I could tell, men were allowed to run nude on the beaches because men could do whatever they want. If you wanted to swim you had to be segregated and then men couldn't look at the women in their bathing suits because it was seen as improper and women couldn't look at the men because

they weren't wearing any clothes at all. Beaches are just for guys. This is where we run nude. This is a dude zone. You can't come here to the nicest place. Yep. Where do the barrels enter into this equation? So it protects their modesty.

So people wanted to swim near each other. And so they could protect their modesty in the realm where these songs were. So let's say you have to go ask your wife a question. Put the barrel on. Yes, you have arms. Susan! Susan, are we having meatballs tonight? Or are we having pork?

And you have the barrel on the whole time while this is happening. Yeah, so no one can see your body. Not suggestive at all. I love that one and I'm just going to go with that one. Oh my gosh. Sam's solid on the barrel. You know, like, there is that thing about men wearing barrels. Yeah, when they're broke.

When you're a rich banker man. Yeah, and you get very poor and you're suddenly wearing a barrel. They take your clothes away and they give you a barrel with straps on it. Now that could be what you're talking about. That doesn't sound like it. Sounds like a separate thing. Okay, so we're moving on to butt problems. What is the temperature of the seawater?

So it wasn't necessarily seawater. Like, the rich people could import the seawater. The poorer people for this invention, it was just salty water. So it was, like, boiled to get the salt dissolved and then, like, a warm bath water. And they'd sit with their butts in the warm bath. That seems plausible to me. It's totally a thing. It's totally a thing. It's totally a thing.

They got a name for that. I don't want to talk about why I know about it. Would the seawater be more of an issue than just the salty water? That'd be healthy. Oh, seawater. Oh, that's true. It is a little weird for the rich people

to use the stuff that's got more bacteria and life in it and the poor people are probably doing the healthier thing. Yeah, people are drinking raw water these days. Yeah, but I totally see that rich people would think oh but it's from the ocean it's imported all the way from key west this is what a floridian sounds like with all your research into billionaires yeah finally a cloak to protect you from rain that doubles as an inflatable boat boat it seems like a no-brainer if you're gonna have a boat you might as well put sleeves in it

and wear it around i think it would be way way too heavy if it was going to be a boat that was like sturdy enough to be taken seriously so So when was this boat invented? I think it was also around the same times as the beach segregation law. So everything was sort of like 1800s. All three of these things were 1800s. I was thinking if it was like 2018, I'm like, well, material science has come a long way. No, this is the old cloak slash boat.

Old cloak boat. I'm going to go... slash boat old globe boat i'm gonna go uh i mean the the the seawater basin feels too real to be real but the barrel is the only one that seems to be real i'm going to hemorrhoid bath because that's the only one that makes sense okay but basin i'm going to go with number one i kind of didn't want to because I don't like spreading out our guesses, but ultimately I think that I think number one is true. Cloak boat is true. No! Woo!

Woo! Woo, fuckers! A little bit of reaction. Cool ranch Doritos! We love cloak boat or boat cloak. It was designed by the Royal Navy Lieutenant Peter Halkett during the 1840s. Here's it as a cloak. And there it is as a boat.

Wait, does it come with a paddle? Like you just walk around with that as like your walking cane? Exactly. The paddle is a walking cane and the sail is an umbrella. So you have a whole outfit that just turns into a boat and it comes with bellows that you can inflate it in like three or four minutes where do you put the bellows i don't know maybe your pocket were these like a mass-produced thing or was it just this dude who had one it was not very popular unfortunately otherwise we could all be wearing cloak boats

today it doesn't seem like you would come up that often that you'd need it except if you were in the navy yeah i mean i do live in Montana. So he designed it for explorers and people who had to cross rugged terrain and then go in rocky waters. Because it was also, it was an inflatable boat, but it was made out of like a thick rubbery material. So if you hit some like rough patches of water and like a poorly constructed canoe would fall apart or break apart in those situations but this raft thing could just keep bumping along got some flex to it yeah so lewis and clark kind of folk might wear this yeah as they're adventuring across them and it's just like well i'm wearing my boat you don't have to have like a separate thing in your backpack this should be the other

option in the oregon trail game do you want to use cloak boat to get across the river? Yeah, and so it's just like a way to navigate across like a river in your path or a bay or an inlet or like part of an ocean that you had to go in and go back out. No, I don't think you should go in the ocean with that. Well, it does not seem seaworthy. How many people died? Sir John Franklin, who did an Arctic expedition in 1845 that became a lost expedition. Okay. Did not die because of the cloak boat, but had one with him. Okay.

So there's... It didn't necessarily not die. It didn't help. Yes. Or maybe it did help. Who knows? Who knows? Yeah.

But it was taken on more Arctic expeditions, including those made by Sir George Simpson, Sir Richardson and Ray, Collinson and McClure. Don't know who any of these men are probably just like rich people who are like i would like a cloak boat please and this uh peter halkett he also designed a two-person inflatable cloth boat that just rolled up so it was not a cloak because it would have been too long for a cloak to fit two people in could have been a double cloak yeah you and your friend both wearing the same cloak yeah we're like like you're like extra tall because you're two people on. Could have been a double cloak. You and your friend both wearing the same cloak. Or like you're extra tall

because you're two people sitting on each other. But yeah, it never caught on. It was like really... No way. I would love one. I want a cloak boat. But he tried to get it to popular use, but there weren't enough explorers using it. And then rich people didn't want it.

Yeah, and so there are only two I think left in existence now. They're both in museums. Sarah, do people ever wear barrels? There is an airtight oak barrel with arms sticking out from it. But it was an early diving suit, not a modesty barrel. Would it just be your fleshy arms sticking out of the barrel? Yeah.

But your head is in the barrel? Wouldn't it leak? They wrapped their arms in leather and stuffed them really hard into the holes. So this is the barrel. Yeah, I know. But your head is in the barrel? Wouldn't it, like, leak? They, like, wrapped their arms in leather and, like, stuffed them really hard into the holes. So this is the barrel. This is the oaken barrel. Oh, my God. Is there, like, a little plate so you can see through? I don't know.

I think so. It looks like it's a barrel. Yeah, there's, like, a little tiny eye hole, maybe, because that's, like, a person size. So this was invented by an Englishman named John Lethbridge. So this was invented by an Englishman named John Lethbridge. He was the first person to create a diving suit that let him recover stuff from wrecked ships. And it was this barrel thing. And it was like watertight enough that he could go down, but like free moving enough that he could stick his arms out and grab some gold.

And then he did this like they'd pull him up and he'd just have gold in his hand i think so i think they would like pull him up somehow and he would just stay down there for a really long time collecting things maybe putting it in a bag or something like that yeah yeah yeah until he got a little dizzy and then he'd like float up right because there's no air circulation the barrels was full it's just a barrel yeah it definitely seems like a first draft for a diving yeah it was a lot of other things were done but that is awesome that museum picture is great and we'll be at the show notes at scishowtentious.org and then as far as like the butt bath that is not true when hydrotherapy was a big thing in victorian era eng Then people were like, ah, the ocean is good

for your health. And so then they created this, which is a wave and rocking bath, which is basically like a giant tub that you could rock back and forth in and simulate the ocean. And it was supposed to really heal you. For people who can't click

on a link, it's like a crescent moon filledilled with ocean water You just rock yourself back and forth The big things that they proclaimed for this It was a sensation Which will delight and benefit you And there will be no splashing in the room I don't know how it would stay so self contained

No splashing In your room No splashing It's a no splashing zone, your parlor. People had too much time on their hands back then. Yeah. Too much money, too. Yeah.

I don't know. A rocking chair full of seawater sounds dope. Yeah, we could build you one. Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then it's time for the Fact Off. Backed off. Welcome back, everybody. Sam Buck totals. Sari's got two.

I've got one, and Stefan's got one, and Sam has zero at the moment. But now is your time to come back, boy. I'm not going to. You can try. You don't. What do you know? So it's time for the Fact Off,

where two panelists, this time Sam and I, have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. The presentees each have a Sam Buck to award to the fact that they like the most. And to decide who goes first, we're going to answer this question from emma sigfried at tag along 572 on twitter there are a lot of people saying that coral reefs are dying how much of the coral reefs are actually still alive slash left the closest percent wins would you like to go first? Yes. Okay. 65%. I will say 80%.

Sam wins. Sam wins! 47.968%. Oh, no. I was way too optimistic. That's very... That's really sad. That shows my privilege, doesn't it?

I just think things are fine and they're not. 80% of the corals in my mansion are still alive. I'll go first, I guess. Okay. In late 2019, NASA satellites spotted an island measuring 150 square kilometers or more than twice the size of Manhattan that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere near the Tonga Archipelago. This wasn't Atlantis or some freaking thing like that.

It was a pumice raft, which is formed by lava released by the eruption of a previously undiscovered underwater volcano cooling into buoyant rocks and then floating together in a huge mass. The rocks were like marble-sized to like basketball-sized. It's a known phenomenon, but it's completely unpredictable, and it only happens once every couple of decades.

And this one wasn't even close to the biggest one. In 2012, the New Zealand Navy took pictures of one that was 26,000 square kilometers. So it's about the size for comparison of Haiti, 26, which is 27,000 square kilometers. Can it support my body? I think you would be ground to a dust. That is the thing about them. They are not nice. So scientists know kind of the basics about them because they're just like rocks full of holes in air so they float.

But they can float for years at a time and travel thousands of miles. And sometimes they last up until just the stones grind against each other until they're sand. So you would be killed probably if you were trying to. It's not my traveling island paradise. Your skin would look great though.

So the fact that they could float for so long has been something that's stymied scientists for a long time. Because something porous like that submerged in water, they thought, should fill up with water and sink to the bottom. Or all of its gases should seep out and it would also sink to the bottom in that case.

This mystery was solved in 2017 when researchers at UC Berkeley x-rayed pieces of a pumice raft that they gathered and discovered that the answer was pretty simple. The water seeped into the stones to a certain point but couldn't seep into smaller pores near the middle of it and so then the water would end up trapped because of surface tension like on either side of the tubes it was getting in so it clogged up the pores so the gas couldn't get out oh yeah except it would get out really really slowly and that's why it can float around for years and eventually it does sink yeah yeah because otherwise i guess the entire ocean would just be rocks. I guess so.

That would be bad. That would be good. That would be a very strange outcome. There was some excitement slash overblown pop science articles proclaiming that the 2019 raft, which was the one as big as Manhattan or twice as big as Manhattan Island, was on a course to pass the Great Barrier Reef. So they thought that people were saying that it would save the reef by depositing marine life onto it

because marine life grabs onto the raft as it goes. And coral polyps are known to be in the raft too. But in an interview in Scientific American, a coral biologist said that for that to happen, the marine life would pretty much have to make the conscious decision to jump off of the raft. I like that better.

Which they can't do because they are coral polyps and they don't have brains, maybe? Or they have very tiny ones. Does that affect evaporation? Yeah, I guess it would. The black balls in the reservoir? It doesn't seem like there's a measurable effect on much of anything because of them.

They don't deposit very much life places. It doesn't seem like they mess anything up. Boats can go through them. Okay, that was my question. If you take a sailboat through them enough, I'd feel like your sailboat would kind of get torn up. It would probably get dinged up. I think that it can be dangerous,

but there are videos of people in catamarans in the middle of these things, and it just looks like rocks as far as the eye can see. It's really nuts. But I don't know if the evaporation thing, because they sink and raise during the day. So the water is sort of... Because when the gas heats up and cools down, it goes up and down.

So maybe they just, I don't know, don't seem to do much of anything for that many rocks. Seems like you do more. If you're a bunch of rocks the size of Haiti, seems like you do something. Turns out I'm just a rock. I would like to tell you about my fact, if you guys are ready.

Are you ready? Albatrosses are big birds. They're very cool. And they have a sort of a mythological connections with fishermen. They also have some ecological connections with fishermen, which is that they can get caught in fishermen's nets as they're sort of trying to pick stuff out of them or just by chance. And that can kill them, which is bad for albatrosses.

So scientists want to study this. They want to understand the connection between albatrosses, grabbed them, and connected a tracker to their backs. And they wanted to know how often and how close these albatrosses got to fishing boats. So in that tracker, they had a thing that detected radar signals and the radio signals that boats transmit to say, like, I'm here and everything's okay. Like, they've got different radio signals that mean different things on boats, mostly for safety. And so they've got, like, a signal that they send out all the time. That's like a, everything's okay right now signal. And so that way they could tell how close is, how close the albatrosses were getting to the boats, which is really smart. Cause like,

you don't have to take pictures. You could just do it with the radio signals and with like detecting the radar that the boat send out. So they got good data from this and it was super useful. They understood more about like male albatrosses do a different thing than female albatrosses and that helped them better understand the ecology and the boat dynamics that were going on. But the weird thing was they discovered that sometimes albatrosses would find boats

and this was all being transmitted live so they didn't have to re-catch the the tracker it went straight to a satellite and got beamed to the scientists sometimes they'd come across boats that were transmitting radar but they were not transmitting the everything's okay signal and that happens when the boat is fishing illicitly because if you're transmitting the everything is all case signal, people can find you. And the albatrosses were, because they were flying around the ocean and like deep ocean, like far away where it's very hard to track what people are doing. And sometimes in international waters, they were finding boats that they could tell with their trackers were illicit fishing boats. And then they were like okay great we got

some good data but we also have an albatross wide tracking system to find illegal fishermen and they are now using it to track and catch illegal fishing boats so there's like a like an albatross surveillance state in the open ocean. And if ever there was a good come up and the albatross is sort of like, yeah, sometimes you kill me and sometimes you go to jail. Isn't there a meme about how birds are run by the government?

Yeah, totally. Birds are fake. It's like a conspiracy theory. The birds are narcs, huh? Can't trust anybody anymore. That's right. So this is still a test concept thing. We are not in the albatross surveillance state yet. They have identified, they have done it.

They have found illegal fishing boats. But it's not like every albatross is tagged with a tracker at this point. No, not yet. What do you guys think? You got to vote. Yeah, we got to vote. Who usually, do you usually say? I can say three, two, one if you guys are ready. 3, 2, 1. Pumice?

Oh, Sam. Pumice. I can be called Pumice. I forgot that we said names. I'm so tired. Okay, we share, Sam, you and I. And I got a fun new name. So I really want one.

Now it's time to ask the Science Couch. we've got a listener question for our couch of finally honed scientific minds at noisy game maker and at sm mclean 95 asks why are the oceans salty that's how they talk no it's not uh i've got some like vague sense of why the oceans are salty which is why like any any body of water at the end of the water cycle gets salty the trash bin it's sort of like all the salt get dissolved as it's running down the land and then when it evaporates the salt doesn't go back up the water goes up and so over time the concentration of salt increases which is like extra true of the great salt lake where the basin of water is smaller and more of it's evaporating away and other salt lakes like that so that's what

why those places are saltier than the ocean what i don't know is why the amount of salt in the ocean stays constant. It is not always increasing the way that that would be the case. Has it increased, though, over the history of… Yes, but it reached a point where it stopped increasing. And there's a reason for that, and I don't know what it is. I don't know either. I do know that salt also comes from hydrothermal vents. So not only running off from rocks eroding, but also from the seafloor, like those spew out salts and minerals and different things. Yeah. There's got to be also some deposition of salts happening where, you know, in certain chemical situations, rocks at the bottom of the ocean or newly uncovered rocks are reacting and taking some salt out of the ocean yeah and it seems like so i wasn't able to find a specific answer to my

biggest question which is why sodium and chloride ions stick around because it's like we're talking about salts and chemically that means a lot of different compounds like ionic compounds but specifically like if we lick the ocean it tastes salty because it's table salt that's dissolved in the water which is sodium chloride as far as i can tell from cobbling together random internet people and noah the national oceanic atmospheric administration yes not a guy not a guy my good friend so some ions tend to get used up by organisms and removed by natural processes while others don't get used. And so things like potassium are really abundant, but like sea life uses it more. It gets cycled back into like the oceanic crust more often.

But sodium and chloride have for some reason slower removal rates than other dissolved ions so where where's it was hank just right when he was saying that's where it all came from so they're just salt and every rock has salt in it yeah yeah well like yeah ions are everywhere atoms are everywhere and so learned about that last episode. Rivers are full of different salts, including sodium chloride and other like atomic minerals, like calcium, magnesium, sulfates, everything. And then it just all gets funneled into the ocean. And I think in the rivers, some organisms use those minerals too. But for some reason in in the ocean it's just like higher sodium

chloride concentration but also all those other minerals in one big pool of here's where all the water goes i guess but also the answer to why there's so much sodium chloride is question mark yeah right as opposed to the other ones i mean it seems like we have some idea that they like those other ions are being used by organisms and sinking to the bottom or getting stored up in biological tissue. Slash, they react with the crust. And it's possible that a marine biologist or some sort of geographer, I don't know what field this would be. Yeah, geochemistry. Yeah, would have a better answer, but I couldn't find one in my research.

It could be some trivial question in the field. They don't even think about it anymore. How boring to think about the salty water. So if there are any of those that follow our Twitter account, let me know. Sam Buck final scores. Sam, one. Stephan, one. Tied for second.

Sari and Hank tied for first. Yay! Stefan won tied for second yeah Sari and Hank tied for first yay if you like this show and you want to help us out it's really easy to do that you can leave us a review wherever you listen super helpful

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you can tweet out your favorite moment from this episode and finally if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us.

I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stefan Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and the wonderful team at WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz,

who also edits a lot of these episodes, along with Hiroka Matsushima. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno. Special thank you this week to Alexis Dahl. And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. There's a small metaphor called M. Ladyi

aka the warty comb jelly or C. Walnut, which are both great names, that has a transient anus. Oh, phew. Does not go in our butts. When they eat, and they just like push the waste toward their skin through a canal,

at the very last moment, a hole opens up so the poop can fly out, and then it just like closes back up and disappears. Is it like a gooey membrane or something that it's opening up in, or what are we talking about? It's like punching a hole through their skin. it like a gooey membrane or something that it's opening up in? Or what are we talking about? No, just like punching a hole through their skin. Oh.

Yeah, Hydra are like that where they don't have a mouth until they do. And then they just rip their fucking face open and eat into it. Just grow a mouth, guys. That was like why they've been studying this. Because they're like, this is probably what happened before we had anuses. Can you imagine your butt ripping every time you had poop? I can.

It probably took a while. Back to the sitz baths.