...Get Salt from the Sea

It is said that salt "is born from the purest things: sun and sea".

Salt reserves are practically inexhaustible. In a sole cubic km of sea water 25 million tons of edible salt, sodium chloride are found.

In other times, salt was not easy to achieve. In ancient China, for example, only gold was more costly than salt. Today, marine salt is achieved by evaporating seawater under the Sun's action.

This is ideal to be done where the climate is warm, rainfall is low, and the wind is dry. The places where marine salt is extracted are much expended. Almost 90 % of these surfaces are occupied by evaporation basins and the rest for crystallization, the process through which salt is passed into crystals.

First, the sea water is left to flow in a series of shallow basins, separated by dikes and wooden obstacles, a phase during which the salt concentration in the water rises. The evaporation process lasts 90-100 days in the tropical climate.

Even if after evaporation the main chemical achieved is sodium chloride, the sea water also contains small amounts of calcium carbonate, calcium sulfate, magnesium sulfate and other salts.

These salts precipitate or separate from seawater at different moments, deposing themselves in layers on the bottom of the evaporation basins. The resulting extremely concentrated saline solution is left flowing in the crystallization (recollection) basins. Here, the sea water is almost completely gone, remaining just solid salt.

This salt is cut and loaded into trucks. It is carried to huge silos where it is washed and after that, packed and transported to ships. Even if our organisms do not need much salt, it is essential to our health (and that of the animals, too). But the obtained salt is not used just in alimentation, but also in different industries: chemical, textile, metallurgical, soap making, tiles, enamel and others. In fact, there are about 14,000 industrial uses for salt.