Road salt

[Noclevername]

Ask Copernicus what that meant, I'm not their interpreter. If I misread what was intended I'm sorry, but it's not something I intend to pursue any further.

[Swift]

The northerners of the USA have huge costs related to winter, my guess is 500 billion per year. Cars, wear and tear on homes, plowing, salting, heating, infrastructure maintenance such as roads. It is not easy, but it is never a disaster at one time so no sympathy or empathy for us.

Ask Copernicus what that meant, I'm not their interpreter. If I misread what was intended I'm sorry, but it's not something I intend to pursue any further.

OK, All Stop!

Copernicus - if the point of your quoted post was to offer some justifications for the use of road salt, then please make that clear, and please reference some actual sources and stick with the topic at hand (salt), and not all the characteristics of winter.

As for the rest of you (I quoted NCN's post as just one example), no more debate as to what Copernicus may or may not have meant, nor a general debate of the pros and cons of either winter or of living in "the North". Stick with a salt discussion.

[Noclevername]

New attempt to reformulate road salt:

https://theconversation.com/to-make-...by-fish-153087

To make less-harmful road salts, we’re studying natural antifreezes produced by fish

"What about natural alternatives? Scientists have found insects and spiders in Alaska that create antifreeze proteins in their bodies that lower the freezing point of water by a few degrees. And some fish, like the Antarctic toothfish (Dissostichus mawsoni), create antifreeze glycoproteins that prevent the blood in their veins from freezing in the coldest waters on Earth."

[Swift]

There have also been work on using sugar beet juice instead of, or with salt.

Missouri Department of Transportation

This has also been tried in Ohio.

[kzb]

Calcium chloride is reportedly a superior road salt. Its freezing point depression is greater than that of sodium chloride and it is said to be less corrosive (not sure why that would be TBH). Given the large amount of calcium in the environment already, I wonder if its ecological effects are milder?

Never tried it myself, has anyone on here?

I've tried urea de-icer (in solid form) and I was not very impressed. It seems quite poor at melting existing ice. Plus, in large scale use, this would be a nitrogenous pollutant that would increase algal growth. Anyone else tried it?

[Copernicus]

There are like a million cubic kilometers of salt under the Mediterranean. Which is about 2 billion metric tons per cubic kilometer. In the USA we use about 20 million metric tons of salt per year. So in about 50 years that would be the equivalent of one millionith of what is under the Mediterranean sea.

Reference for the Mediterranean containing over one million cubic kilometers of salt under it. https://www.researchgate.net/publica...alinity_crisis

[Copernicus]

Over long timescales the salinity of the oceans is gradually increasing, due to erosion.

Built on that trend will be shorter timescale events such as ice ages (which lock up freshwater in ice) and warm interglacials where that freshwater is returned to the oceans.

There are also events where land-locked seas are evaporated, leaving their salt behind. This is happening now at the Dead Sea. This is where our salt deposits came from, and I suspect they are not all as old as the coal deposits.

An interesting question is, what proportion of the natural erosion rate is the salt added to the roads? It's quite possible this is small compared to the natural increase in salinity over time.

Apparently the Mediterranean lowered the oceans salinity by a staggering 6 percent over a million years. Talk about the power of nature. https://www.livescience.com/42115-gi...explained.html