How much salt is there in sea water? What concentration do you need before crystals start forming? What will those crystals look like? I am sure those are the kind of questions that keep you awake at night!

Of course this can easily assessed experimentally. On a visit to the University of Bergen’s Centre for Science Education just now, I was shown the result of such an experiment: A litre of water was mixed with 35 grams of salt to simulate sea water with its typical salinity. Below, you see what the beaker looked like after sitting out for three months.

You can see that salt crystals are forming at the walls of the beaker, but that their structure depends on depth below the initial water level (see the 1000 ml mark on the beaker).

When there is still a lot of water in the beaker, crystals look like ornate flowers. Then, the less water is left in the beaker, the more square the crystals become. And at the bottom of the beaker, you see the typical salt crystals you would expect.

Actually, even though they look like the kind of salt crystals I would expect, apparently someone who knows about crystallography commented that there must be other stuff in there than just cooking salt since the crystals don’t look the way they should. I need to read up on this! :-)

Anyway, this is an experiment that I want to do myself, so maybe in three months time there will be more pictures of this!

Thanks for a very nice lunch, Olaug, Frede, Andreas, Morven and Elin! Looking forward to working with you a lot more in the future! :-)

P.S.: with this blog post I am testing to blog pretty much “real time” from my mobile phone, so if you notice anything odd, please let me know!