Why Synthesized?

[Welles]

Just for interesting, why the salt used in aquarium today is all the synthesized salt, not the nature salt from ocean ?

[MrZ]

Lets oversimplify things for a moment. Pretend natural salt water contained nothing but Ca+, Na+, Cl-, & CO3-- As you dried out the natural salt water in order to obtain the natural salt, you would be gradually increasing the concentration of the 4 ions mentioned. As you drive off water, you start to reach the saturation point and crystals begin to form, but instead of calcium chloride and sodium carbonate - nice friendly compounds which would later re-dissolve in fresh water, you would get mostly sodium chloride and calcium carbonate. The calcium carbonate will not dissolve back into natural seawater any more than your aragonite sand (calcium carbonate) would. Removing the water from saltwater is a one way street.

Drying out saltwater forms all kinds of these compounds which will not readily dissolve back into natural seawater, forcing manufacturers to come up with creative artificial salts which will closely approximate natural seawater when dissolved in pure freshwater. Now I would wager that they get most of their raw materials from saltwater, but its not as straightforward as dehydrating saltwater and taking the result and adding water to it later.

This is also the reason you must add salt to the full volume of water when making artificial salt water. If you instead put a couple cups of instant ocean in the bottom of a bucket and then started pouring water in over the top, you would end up creating a bunch of insoluble percipitates which would settle out and screw up the water chemistry.

Make any sense?

[T Man]

Originally posted by MrZ Make any sense?

Perfect, Thank you. T

[Billybeau1]

I think you mean synthetic no ?

Basically means man made.