Have you ever used a salt shaker to sprinkle salt on your food? It’s fun to know that salt shakers can be made in all sorts of shapes and designs, not just the plain ones we usually see. But have you ever wondered where salt actually comes from? Let’s find out!
Salt is something we use to make our food taste better, but it’s not like the fruits and vegetables that come from plants or trees. Salt is a bit different. If you look at salt closely under a magnifying glass, you’ll see tiny square-shaped crystals. These crystals look like little rocks!
Yes, salt is a type of rock! It’s a solid material called a mineral. But you won’t find it just anywhere in the ground. Salt is found in special places on Earth. Sometimes, it even forms big fields called salt flats, like the ones in Utah and Bolivia. In Bolivia, there’s so much salt that they even built a hotel out of it!
There are two main ways to get salt. One way is by mining it from the ground. In some places, people dig deep into the earth to find salt. This creates tunnels and caves, like the ones under the city of Detroit, Michigan, and in Pakistan. These salt mines are so big that people can visit them!
The second way to get salt is from the ocean. Ocean water is salty, and when the water evaporates or dries up, it leaves salt behind. In some places, people make shallow pools of ocean water and let the sun dry them up, leaving the salt behind.
Scientists think that the places where we find salt in the ground might have been covered by oceans long ago. When the ocean water dried up, it left the salt behind. That’s why we can dig it up today!
So, salt is something we eat, but it doesn’t come from a living thing like plants or animals. It’s more like a rock that we can dig out of the ground or collect from the ocean. Isn’t that cool? Thanks for exploring the world of salt with me. Remember, there are mysteries all around us, so stay curious!
Salt Crystal Experiment: Create your own salt crystals at home! With the help of an adult, dissolve a few tablespoons of salt in a cup of warm water. Pour the salty water into a shallow dish and place it in a sunny spot. Check the dish every day and observe what happens as the water evaporates. Can you see the salt crystals forming? Draw a picture of what you see each day and compare the sizes and shapes of the crystals.
Salt Detective: Go on a salt hunt in your kitchen! With an adult, look at the labels of different foods and spices to see if they contain salt. Make a list of the items you find. Are there any foods that surprised you? Discuss with your family why salt might be added to these foods. Can you think of any foods that might not need extra salt?
Salt Flat Art: Imagine you are visiting a salt flat like the ones in Bolivia. Use white chalk on dark paper to draw your own salt flat landscape. Include mountains, the sun, and maybe even a salt hotel! Think about how the salt flat might look different at different times of the day or in different weather. Share your artwork with your class and talk about what you learned about salt flats.
Sure! Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript:
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(phone ringing) – Hi, it’s Doug. Do you use a salt shaker to put salt on your food? Well, I was excited to find out recently that you don’t have to use a plain ordinary salt shaker. There are artists who make salt shakers out of just about any object or shape you can imagine. Whatever your favorite kind of thing is, there’s probably a salt shaker made to look like that thing. Someone named Fotini has a question about salt. Let’s give Fotini a call now. (phone ringing) – Hi Doug. – Hi Fotini. – I have a question for you. Where does salt come from? – Oh, that’s a great question. Maybe you’re thinking about this because you put salt on your food. You have a sense of where some of your food comes from. It’s not hard to see that the vegetables you eat are plants, or come from parts of plants—broccoli, asparagus, carrots. They’re all from plants. Likewise, you probably know with fruits, many of them come from trees—apples, oranges, pears. But salt… Salt seems like a weird one. Does it come from a plant? Before I say anything more, what do you think? Where do you think salt comes from? Now would be a good time to pause the video and discuss. Okay, you ready? You might be familiar with the idea that the ocean contains water that’s salty. It’s tempting to think maybe salt comes from the ocean. Do people somehow get the salt out of the water? Hmm, that’s an interesting idea. Let’s hang on to that idea and come back to it a little later. One really interesting clue is to look at salt under a magnifying glass or even a microscope. Look at this. When you do, you find out that salt is made of these little tiny square-shaped crystals. They almost look like little bits of rock. And in fact, if you have salt like this, it’s been ground up. But you can actually buy salt before it gets ground up. It’s often in a form that’s bigger and chunkier, which does look like tiny rocks. It’s called rock salt. Whoa, is salt a type of rock? Does it come from the ground? How would we even find this out? How could we track this down? Well, one way would be to call up some of the people who make and sell salt. There are many different brands of salt sold at the grocery store. So what you can do is look up the makers of salt and then just ask them where they get the salt from. And guess what? Well, I went ahead and did that for you. Here you can see a place where salt is being mined out of the ground by machines. Whoa, so salt is a solid material that comes from the ground. If you want to call it a rock, you could. It’s a type of solid material called a mineral. Now it’s not found just anywhere in the ground. You can’t just dig in the ground and expect to find salt. It’s only found in some places on Earth. Sometimes there’s salt just lying on the ground itself, like a field of salt. When this happens, this is called a salt flat, like this salt flat in Utah or this salt flat in Bolivia. A place that has so much salt, they’ve even built an entire hotel out of salt. (soft upbeat music) In certain other places on Earth where salt is found, though, it’s not found lying on the ground, but instead it has to be dug from underground. When this is done, sometimes as people dig farther and deeper into the ground to get the salt, they have to create tunnels. This leaves behind incredible passageways (soft upbeat music) and entire caves carved into the ground. And sometimes in surprising places too, like when salt was found to be in the ground underneath the city of Detroit, Michigan—a place where you can walk around on the surface and see tall buildings, city streets, but meanwhile, hidden below the city, tunnels, caves, and passageways carved into the salt. Detroit, Michigan isn’t the only place with salt caves and tunnels. What you’re seeing here is a salt mine found underground in Pakistan. The caves and tunnels that have been dug out of the salt over the years are so big now that people actually go and visit them. Or check out this building located in Iran. The people who designed this building were inspired by the beauty of underground salt caves. They made this entire restaurant out of salt, much of which comes from a nearby salt mine. But now what is all that salt doing in the ground? How did salt get there to begin with? Why is there salt in the ground? Well, remember earlier when we thought about the fact that the oceans are salty? You can get salt out of ocean water by boiling or evaporating the water, which leaves salt behind. This is actually a second, different way of getting salt. In some places where they make shallow pools of salt water, then let the water evaporate or dry up on hot dry days, it leaves salt behind. One idea that scientists have about why there’s salt located in certain places in the ground is that those might be places where there used to be ocean water. As that salty ocean water dried up, it left the salt behind. So in summary, salt is something we eat, but it doesn’t come from a living thing. Instead, it’s more like a rock. It’s a mineral, a solid material we dig out of the ground. That’s all for this week’s question. Thanks, Fotini, for asking it. There are mysteries all around us. Stay curious and see you next week.
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