Why is Water Hard?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: [00:00:00]
Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
Chris, I got a question for you, man. So, just in general, when Michigan, I know you're a big football fan, and you used to be, at least when, in a, in a past life, you used to be a pretty diehard University of Michigan fan. Is [00:00:30] that still the case?
Chris Bolhuis: I, I do. I like Michigan. You know, I'm all about the state of Michigan, right? So anybody that is playing from Michigan, I'm, I'm rooting
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Nobody's allowed to say anything bad about Michigan in front of Chris Bolhuis.
Chris Bolhuis: No,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, that's definitely one rule.
Chris Bolhuis: but if Michigan and Michigan state are playing that I'm pulling for Michigan,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: okay.
Chris Bolhuis: so that's kind of how that goes. Does that make sense?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that makes sense. What do you feel, um, when one of the teams plays Penn State?
Chris Bolhuis: So I have,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Are you at all conflicted because of me or [00:01:00] not?
Chris Bolhuis: I am. I actually am. Yeah. I am. Yep. I pull for Penn State because of you. Yeah, I
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, there we go. We've acquired a new fan here.
Chris Bolhuis: uh, I mean, everybody that I've met from Penn State, you know, Lee Kump, I met him and, and, just great people. So they're a lot like Michigan people, I
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, I think so. I think so. And a lot different than Wisconsin people. And, you know, Illinois people. And Indiana people. Oh.
Chris Bolhuis: That's.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: a bunch of, you know, [00:01:30] anybody, who I work with is not really from the Midwest and doesn't really know me. Really know anything about the Midwest. They're like, Oh, well, you're from like Minnesota, aren't you?
Or something. And I was like, Oh no, Michigan. And they're like, Oh, okay, well, whatever. And I'm like, no, no, no, hold on. The, the Midwestern states were so similar. We have to hate each other, you know, like we hate Wisconsin. And the reason is we're so similar to Wisconsin really, you know, but way better,
Chris Bolhuis: Wisconsin wants to rename Lake Michigan, Lake Wisconsin. And I have, I have some serious problems with that.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. I mean, they're wrong. So. [00:02:00] That's a stupid idea. Stupid idea.
Chris Bolhuis: It's, it's not. Yeah.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, that's our leg. Shut up.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. You know, I don't, I don't know if we've ever talked about this, but one, of the times we were on a trip and we were coming back into, we were driving back in and you enter Michigan and it says something, there's a big sign, you know, it says the Great Lakes state.
Right. And Jenny says, Oh, it's so good to be back home. And somehow we turned our discussion to the Great Lakes and she's like, well, there are lakes.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah.
Chris Bolhuis: And I'm like, what, what do you mean? She's like, [00:02:30] well, they belong to us.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: meaning Michigan?
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Mainly Michigan. And I'm like, well, not really, Jen.
And she's like, what? She was truly dumbfounded that,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's so
Chris Bolhuis: but that is, I think that's a lot of Michiganders feel that way. Yeah.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: is, okay, we're kind of just BSing around this. But this actually ties into the episode we're going to talk about in a tendential way. But Chris, I felt the same way when I moved to Canada, you know, growing up in Michigan, we think of the five great lakes, right?
You know, you've got the ones that surround Michigan, Huron, [00:03:00] Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. Those are the five great lakes, but you moved to Canada and they're like, no, no, no, no. There are. A lot more Great Lakes because they extend all the way up, right?
You Great Bear Lake, Great Slave Lake, Lake Winnipeg, like huge Lake Athabasca, huge lakes. I mean, they're actually, I think Great Slave Lake is the deepest lake They're huge. and so Canadians get a little.
Worried when we only talk about the five great lakes that are on the border
Chris Bolhuis: I get that. In fact, Jesse, like, I didn't even know this until [00:03:30] you started talking about how big these lakes were and the amount of water that's held in them. it's amazing.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: but it's a cool feature. you can look at the map it's like river networks. You can look at the water distribution system, where water is on the planet, and you can tell the underlying geology. By that because where the shield, the hard basement rocks of the Canyon Shield hit the soft sediments of the interior.
That's where the Great Lakes are, all of them. And they just follow this beautiful line. And uh, it's a really a cool example of that. And Chris, let's [00:04:00] transition, 'cause we're talking about hard water here. This episode, which I dunno, it's tangential to lakes and great lakes a little bit.
Chris Bolhuis: It is. It absolutely is. But you might be wondering, cause this is in our series of climate, right? And why would we do an episode devoted to hard water and salty oceans when we're talking about climate? we need to make sure that we bring that connection home. And I think that's a good place to start.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: agree. So let's just run through an overview of what we're going to [00:04:30] cover. But before we get to that, if you listen to this on the podcast, you can find this episode with a couple others that we've released with all the images in a climate book that you can buy for a couple bucks on our Camp Geo app.
So the first link in your show notes is the Camp Geo app. go there, download that, and you can get access to, to this climate. series that we have with all the key images that you need, and some extra content that you're not getting on the podcast. And you can also purchase access to our Yellowstone book and our Geology of Grand Canyon book as well.
And the Camp Geo [00:05:00] Introduction to Earth Sciences that is still for free. So anyway, point there if you're listening to this on the podcast. So Chris, let's just review here or give an overview of what we're going to cover and we're going to talk about really hard water. What is really the question is what are salts in water? What does that mean? What is a salt in water? Where do they come from? And this really I think, interesting question that I think a lot of very informed, very smart people have never thought of, and if they have thought of it, they kind of ponder it and, [00:05:30] don't spend too much time on it, which is why are the oceans salty, and lakes not? that's one of the key pieces here, and then, you know, as part of that is the role of groundwater and rivers, and then coming back to sort of hard water, quote unquote hard water, why we call it hard, but it fits in this series on climate, because we're really talking about weathering. This is the weathering process that has a huge control on the concentration of carbon dioxide in your atmosphere is one potential solution to climate change and, you know, is part of this carbon cycle, the slow, long, [00:06:00] fun, interesting rock based carbon cycle.
Chris Bolhuis: And carbon plays a very important role in this chemical weathering process because carbon dioxide combines with water in the atmosphere to create this weak acid. And then that weak acid goes to work on rocks, dissolving them selectively. Certain things get dissolved better. We're going to talk about this.
And then it brings these ions via rivers and via groundwater to the oceans.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's right. So Chris, can we just define hard water? And [00:06:30] let's give an example. You, live a little bit out in the country, at least on a couple acres. What, how many acres do you have? Seven? Is that right? Five acres. Okay. But you have well water. Is that right?
Chris Bolhuis: Yes, I do. Yep.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: is it hard?
Quote
Chris Bolhuis: It is hard water for sure. Yeah. It's, it's got a lot of, uh, got a lot of iron in it and it has, that's some, that's an interesting thing, Jesse, is I think when people think of hard water, they think of iron in the water, but I think it's because they think metal and metals are hard.
And, you know, I think that's where this, this [00:07:00] misconception comes from, I think.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that's interesting. Okay. And so hard, quote unquote, uh, the term is used because it's, it's hard to like get soap to lather with it, right? That's, that's, that's where the term hard comes from, but what it really means is that there's a lot of stuff dissolved in the water and the important ions for this purpose are calcium and magnesium.
Iron is another one. That is in that water. We live in Pennsylvania and we have we have city water, but it's hard. Like our water, we live in a limestone karst topography where the [00:07:30] water is just hard all over the place.
Chris Bolhuis: I think we need to take a step back a second and just talk about salts because it's salt that's in the water that is what makes the water hard, but I think a lot of people anyway, maybe not our audience because our audience is so smart and I mean that seriously, um, yeah, they're the best, but, salts is a reference to ions that are in the water.
It's not just sodium chloride. Yeah. In fact, those are not the ions that are, those aren't the ions that make the water [00:08:00] hard to begin with. it's more calcium and carbonate ions that are in the water that prevent the soap from lathering. And if soap won't lather, then it can't do its job, which is clean.
And so we call it hard water for that reason. But salts is a reference to a whole... just stuff that is dissolved in the water in ion form.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: that's right. And it makes it hard to lather. And so the question, Chris, we're going to come to is where did these ions come from? Where do these calcium, magnesium and the bicarbonate, where does that come [00:08:30] from? And the key here It's silicate rock. That's really the key. It's calcium, silica, oxygen, or magnesium, calcium, silica, oxygen.
There's a ton of minerals, again, that have that composition, but those things break down, and they're easier to break down because that's kind of a mantle y composition. Lots of magnesium, lots of calcium, a little bit of silica. That's kind of a olivine or pyroxene type thing. Those break down, release those ions into the water system, which then work their way through the water system.
Chris Bolhuis: And a few of the really [00:09:00] important ions that are going to Get brought to the oceans are these calcium ions, the magnesium ions, and importantly to bicarbonate ions, they all get brought to the ocean where organisms, marine organisms are going to take those calcium ions. They're going to take the bicarbonate anions and they're going to use it to make their shells and it's turned into calcium carbonate, CaCO3 and.
That's the main component of the mineral calcite. It's the main component [00:09:30] of the rock limestone. so these ions get brought to the ocean, organisms use it, these organisms live, they die, and they settle down in the ocean floor, forming rocks, removing carbon and putting it into the slow carbon cycle that we've talked about a couple episodes before.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yes, that's exactly right. It's such a key process. I mean, it's just, it's hard to overstate this process, I think, and I don't know, Chris, I have a hard time, like, not[00:10:00] belaboring this point in class a little bit. I don't have the time to really spend a ton of time on it, but I, like, it's hard for me to, like, stay out of the weeds and not get overly excited not get, like, too down into it, because it's just so important.
Chris Bolhuis: Well, okay. So let's talk about that. what do you do? How do you bring this topic up in your classes? And then I'll talk about like what I do and why I think this is so important as well. And also Jesse, you don't have to tamp down your excitement. Like that's, it's a
Dr. Jesse Reimink: the...
Chris Bolhuis: Jesse is [00:10:30] fun.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I know it's true, but excited Jesse is also a little bit rambly, Jesse. So we, we have to tone that part down. Um, uh, the way I do it here, Chris is cause you know, we're, we're in Pennsylvania, central Pennsylvania, and, uh, we have a lot of what are called spring creeks here. And these are sort of karst.
Creeks. We've talked about that in the podcast a bunch before, but we're sort of in a limestone rich area where water's flowing through the groundwater system. It's picking up ions and those things are flowing into the rivers in the valleys. I come at it from a trout fishing side because [00:11:00] the, the spring fed creeks are really, really, biologically super active rivers.
And so they get, the trout get big. It's really great fly fishing area in this part of Pennsylvania because of that, because there's so many ions in the water. And so I kind of come at it from like, Hey, great fly fishing, look at these beautiful rivers we have here in this area. Why is it so good here?
And then that leads me into ions in the water. Why are the ions in the water? Well, we got a bunch of limestone, a lot of rocks dissolving and going into the river system. How do you, sort of tackle [00:11:30] that.
Chris Bolhuis: I come at it usually when I'm talking about rivers and groundwater, and I just ask the question because I think it's something that a lot of people, and keep in mind, I'm, I'm teaching high school kids, right? 14 years old, up to 18 years old. And I ask them, have you ever sat along the banks of a large river?
You know, whether that be the Grand River here running right through Michigan or the Mississippi River, the Missouri River, just a big river, right? You sit along it and this water just goes by You know, it just never stops. [00:12:00] And you, at some point, if you're a curious person, you have to wonder where is all this water coming from, right?
And, so we talk about that. because it's, it's this. Common curiosity question, I think. If you're a curious person, it's one of these things that you think about. And then I use that to talk about another common curiosity question, which is, Why are the oceans salty? Because they've all swam in our lakes, right?
I mean, most of my kids. I did have one student 17 year old girl, a [00:12:30] Hudsonville, born and raised girl, that had never been to any of the Great Lakes before.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Wow. It's 20 minutes down the road. That's, uh, that's, uh, amazing. Yeah.
Chris Bolhuis: Yes, we, we solved that problem for her, but, um, anyway, they've noticed then because most of our, kids have also been into the ocean and, you know, they go south on spring break or whatever. Right. And you can't help, but notice that the oceans are really, really salty and our lakes are not.
Okay. Well, why is
Dr. Jesse Reimink: what do they say to that, Chris? Because I, you know, as I said before, we've, [00:13:00] I've come across very smart, very knowledgeable, very highly educated people who, who haven't really thought of this, who haven't been, had that, had that question, that juxtaposition
pose to them. So what Do your students say?
Yeah.
Chris Bolhuis: do you ask that your students that, do you have them like just raise their hands? How many of you have ever thought about this
Dr. Jesse Reimink: I mean, I kind of do, but I've also, by the time I ask them that, I've kind of given away the, the, given away the ghost, I've sort of given them all the information they need to answer the question, so it's not a fair, like,
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Okay. I ask at the outset, how many of you have thought about what, you know, [00:13:30] why the rivers flow, right? I just ask. And then how many of you have thought about why oceans are salty and our lakes are not? And I'd say maybe half of them have asked that question to themselves and then some of them are looking at me like I have a horn growing out of my head.
Like what? What? Why would I think about that? You know, they're just not, curious. I don't know, whatever. But we think about this, right? I give them time to think about this. and the most common answer I get, which is actually a really smart answer. they say it's because of the rocks in the ocean.[00:14:00]
The ocean has different rocks than the lakes do.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay. So they flipped it. They flipped it in their mind. Yeah. Okay. They've got the, hey, that's interesting. They've got the cart and the horse. They just got the cart before the horse. They're interesting. Hey, that's, That's good though. I mean, that, that's really insightful. So then do you follow up and say why, you know, why is Lake Michigan not depositing limestone or something like that?
Chris Bolhuis: well, they know that they know that there's no limestone in Lake Michigan. and so that's, I think maybe what leads them down that path. And they [00:14:30] say that the rocks are different in the oceans and that's what makes the ocean salty, which is really good logic, but it's just backwards. The rocks are there.
Because the oceans are salty not the other way around.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Oh, Chris, and this is the key part. You know, when you're sitting by a river and this is what I do now, you know, now that, and I think you do this too, now that we know this fact about the earth is that the key here is that rivers and lakes like Lake Michigan have an outlet. They're flowing out [00:15:00] somewhere.
And so water doesn't Aggregate. They're that long, really. and what, what do rivers have in them? Well, they have salt in them and we'll come back to this later on. .
Well, where's that salt going? Well, it's flowing downhill. It's going into a lake, maybe Lake Michigan. Then it's going out to St. Lawrence seaway, eventually hitting the Atlantic ocean. Well, what happens there? There's no outlet to the ocean. There's no way for water to get out. The only way that water gets out is by distillation or evaporation from the surface into the atmosphere, and then starts the water cycle over again.
Well, salt doesn't [00:15:30] evaporate. So it's all about the outlet. That's the key difference. The ocean has no outlet, lakes do,
Chris Bolhuis: yeah The only way that water is gonna leave the ocean because that is the ultimate Basin is by evaporation and when evaporation takes place anything gets in the water stays behind and the water leaves and so aggregate that over time And the oceans that are going to get saltier and saltier and saltier, but this begs the question, Jesse, they're like, wait a minute, rivers are not salty.
You know, [00:16:00] everybody knows this and you're saying that the oceans get salty because rivers are dumping salts into them, but yet the rivers are not salty. So then we need to tackle that.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: So Chris, this brings up a really interesting historical, uh, uh, fact that back in the day, in sort of the late 1800s, early 1900s, when we were still having a significant amount of debate about the age of the earth, Let's ignore the sort of religious side first of all, but the scientific community was debating about a couple [00:16:30] tens of millions of years old or like billions of years old.
We didn't really know. people used this process to try and calculate the age of the earth because you can see how this might be a clock. Rivers have some salt in them. It's a little bit, but they're flowing into the ocean and the ocean has no outlet. So you could see how this is kind of like a sand dial now.
we know the amount of salt coming out of rivers. We can measure that kind of broadly. They could measure it back then. know the amount of salt in the ocean, which is a lot higher, so how long did it take for the rivers to [00:17:00] deliver all of the salt to the ocean? And what they calculated is a number that's a couple hundred million years,
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, it's flawed logic though.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Well, I, I find it an amazing piece of logic that the number they got is not the age of the earth.
The number they got is something different,
Chris Bolhuis: here's where I'm saying that it's flawed logic is because when the oceans get saturated in salts they're going to lay down rocks. and so it's not as if, rivers are bringing salts to the oceans, it's not as if in 10 million [00:17:30] years, the oceans are going to be saltier than they are now.
They get to a certain point and they start to lay down rocks like limestone and dolostone and things like this that are removing the salts from the water. And that's, where I said, it is great logic. but it's flawed.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: no, absolutely right, so what they calculated is something more akin to the residence time of salt in the ocean, which it's not really the residence time, but it's something more akin to that than the age of the earth. Or the ages of the oceans, for instance. that calculation highlights the point here, is that where do we get our ions [00:18:00] from?
While they're in rivers, we can trace them, we know they're in rivers, but, where are they ultimately coming from?
Chris Bolhuis: I was just going to say we need to back out of this and talk about where the salts that end up in the rivers come from, and that leads to a discussion about groundwater, which, this is kind of the way and the reason I do this in my class, because logically it makes sense, right?
why do rivers continue to flow even during long, serious drought, It's because they're being fed by [00:18:30] groundwater, which is a much, much, much larger source of where the world's water is. So, most rivers are fed by groundwater, and therefore the salts that rivers contain are getting to them.
from the groundwater. So let's talk about that, Jesse. why does groundwater have a better ability to dissolve things and put things in solution? what's happening with that?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah. So Chris, it has to do with the rocks and the sort [00:19:00] of time that the water's in contact with rocks. and so the key here is groundwater. You kind of need to think what makes chemical reactions progress?
Cause we're talking about dissolving rock. That's a chemical reaction. So what makes chemical reactions go to completion? And they need time, Either you need to heat it up, right? Heat makes reactions go faster, or you need time. You need longer time. You need to stir the solution longer.
I always think back to like, you know, high school chemistry or college chemistry, where, okay, you take some green solution, yellow solution, mix it together, try and get some, purple [00:19:30] solution out of it or whatever, right? And there's a couple corrections. You got to stir it, So you got to stir it. You got to take time. And the thing here is that streams, they're flowing pretty fast. They are interacting with rocks and stuff along the way, but they don't have a lot of time. The water rock interaction takes a long time. The other thing about groundwater is surface area. If you have water percolating through soil or rock, there's so much more surface area.
You have water kind of trickling through cracks and working its way through and kind of percolating through this rock system. There's a lot more [00:20:00] rock exposed to the same volume of water than there is in a stream. So surface area time makes this reaction, this weathering reaction, go faster.
Chris Bolhuis: And certain rocks tend to be much more susceptible to this kind of dissolution than others. And if you've ever been in inside of a cave, That involves the rock limestone, and limestone is just the one. That calcium carbonate is very susceptible to being dissolved, even in a very weak acid solution like a carbonic acid.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: absolutely. so we have [00:20:30] groundwater, and as you said, groundwater feeds streams. If you have, uh, what's called a freestone stream, where it's basically fed by, rain or runoff water that's flowing along the surface, that won't be that salty. That won't have that much hard water in it.
Because it's like rainwater coming, it's being in snow, snowmelt draining off and going right into the river. If you have like a spring Creek, something that's fed by springs, like we have here in Pennsylvania, that water is pretty salty pretty quote unquote hard because it's fed mostly by groundwater.
And groundwater has all that time and all that surface [00:21:00] area to drive that chemical reaction forward. So goes into streams, streams become salty.
Chris Bolhuis: but not really salty. they get their salts from it, right? When you say that to a group of young people, they're going to think, oh, it's going to taste salty, but they know that it doesn't, you know? And, and so we're talking about then the rivers are dumping bit. By bit by bit salts into the ocean.
The only way that water leaves is by evaporation and then the salts stay. So over geologic [00:21:30] time, these salts are going to accumulate, right? it's kind of, to me, it's a little bit like distillation, if that makes sense. you're just separating the water from the salts in the oceans.
This process, that's what happens. That's the only way the water's going to leave.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, that's exactly right. And so, you know, the key here is that different... Reservoirs have different salt concentrations and rivers they are salty, but not very much, not enough to taste even your hard water, Chris, you're pumping water out of the ground from your well, it's hard, but it doesn't [00:22:00] taste like salt.
I mean, maybe you can taste a difference between like, the water coming out of the city water system, but it's not like you're tasting salt water, right? It's not even close to the ocean level. So. has some salt in it, but not very much. And then the salt gets driven up in the oceans because of time and evaporation.
And that's the same thing as like restricted basins. The great salt Lake in the Western U S there's a whole bunch of these sort of salt deposits, actual, salts that are deposited from these lakes that are restricted basins where [00:22:30] evaporation is the main way that water gets out of this Lake that just drives up the salt content in the same way that it happens in the oceans.
It's just doesn't have as much time. so. Anyway, that's a little bit of a side tangent, but,
Chris Bolhuis: And bringing this back then to people that have well water, you typically are going to have to have a water softener to take these salts out of the water. If you don't, or you don't keep up on your water softener, which, that means dumping salt in your water softener, which it seems counterintuitive, but, then you can have problems that [00:23:00] are created by this then.
Like you can get then, Lime precipitated, on the inside of pipes. And
Dr. Jesse Reimink: and it especially happens, Chris, in your hot water pipes, because that water is hotter, and so, you know, starting to precipitate stuff more. I often see this, Chris, on, like, my coffee kettle, and we have, like, a hot water kettle as well, and if you run that hot water, you know, heat up the hot water kettle for a little, a couple times, you can see the, the sort of white precipitate And that stuff's actually pretty hard to dissolve. You gotta like dump vinegar in it to clean it out to actually dissolve that stuff because it's really hard to re [00:23:30] dissolve.
Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. It's, rock. so it can cause problems. Um, and we also, you can figure out how hard your water is, right? How hard your water supply is.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah, super interesting Jesse have a little side note here. You can see that, you know parts of Michigan have hard water deep red in here Virginia though where my son and bonus daughter live They don't. They have a well, but they don't need a water softener, which is super interesting.
And was asking me about this, my [00:24:00] bonus daughter. She's like, you know, when I wash my hands or something like that, I use soap, it feels really, really slippery. And I'm, that is a telltale sign of soft water. Right? I don't notice it anymore because I've had well water and a water softener for most of my life, so I don't notice it anymore, but it's a, it is a thing that you feel like it's just softened water, the soap does a really good job, and it leaves this kind of, you have this slippery kind of feeling on your skin.
It's, [00:24:30] I don't know, it's hard to describe. Do you know what I'm talking
Dr. Jesse Reimink: yeah, yeah, no, for sure. For sure. I definitely know what you're talking about. you know, I always, I always liked the well water, um, it's like a different taste, right? You know, it's slightly different taste. I like going over to the Bolhuis household and have some well water.
Cause it has a, a little bit different taste. It doesn't taste chemically. It just kind of tastes like, ah, I'm some nutrients here in this water.
Chris Bolhuis: Yeah. Do you, do you notice a little funk to it or not?
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Your water in particular.
Chris Bolhuis: gas? Yeah. My water.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: No, not that I remember. I remember last time or a couple times ago [00:25:00] that I was over there, you, you mentioning it and it didn't stand out to me,
Chris Bolhuis: Okay. Some people are very sensitive to that. I, I'm not, but so anyway, we, bought a new refrigerator and, um, I put a filter in that in line with it. And so that water now is, I love it. it's so good. There's no, there's no funk to it or anything like that. It's just, ah, I love well water.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, get a little bit of salt, you get some nutrients, you know,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And even, uh, here in Pennsylvania, we have city water, but the city water is pretty hard. I mean, we [00:25:30] don't need to treat it. but it is on the hard side. some people do have water softeners just to soften it up cause they don't like the hard water or something.
I mean, we get a lot of like scaly deposits in, like I said, the coffee maker, just got to like run vinegar through it every once in a while to,
Chris Bolhuis: are you
Dr. Jesse Reimink: kind of leach that out.
Chris Bolhuis: places like in York or, and state college
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Yeah, Morristown State College. It's a big limestone. I mean, in the eastern Pennsylvania here, in the Piedmont, so we're like much more like Virginia, you know, we're kind of in basement rocks here. Not a lot of limestone anymore. So, uh, you know, [00:26:00] once again, Chris, it's all controlled by geology.
The geology kind of runs
everything. It runs
Chris Bolhuis: It makes the world go round, doesn't it? That's right. Hey, let's bring this back, Jesse, as we wrap up this episode. Listen, we're talking about climate. This is, you know, number four in our series on climate, but it's important to talk about salty oceans, hard water in this discussion because this weathering, this chemical weathering process that brings these salts.
Calcium, Carbon, [00:26:30] Oxygen, Hydrogen that brings them to the oceans and then those ions recombine and get put into the slow carbon cycle. And so that's, that I think it comes full circle, like,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: It does. It absolutely does. And like I said at the outset, I have a hard time with this because it's just, it's one of those things where. It's so important. It, once you grasp this, once you understand how this works, it is so beautiful, it just links so many parts of our lives, right?
If you have hard water in your [00:27:00] home, you can turn on your faucet and every time you see that little white residue in your coffee pot, you can say, Oh, this is actually why. Earth is like this thing right here, this is a representation of the reason that earth is habitable because it's part of this thermostat that regulates earth climate, makes it warmer than it should be compared to other planets without this whole, salty water, groundwater weathering cycle, it's just a beautiful thing.
understanding that link allows you to kind of [00:27:30] recognize that every day and appreciate that every day.
Chris Bolhuis: Hey, the more, you know,
Dr. Jesse Reimink: The more, you know, the more, you know, Hey, well, I'm excited to come back to the Bolhuis household and have some, uh, have some good well water.
Chris Bolhuis: anytime, anytime
Dr. Jesse Reimink: do you, a random question? Do you know, what the aquifer is?
Is it a sandstone or is it like a sandy layer?
And how
Chris Bolhuis: it is. So yeah, my well is 124 feet deep
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay.
Chris Bolhuis: and it's a glacial aquifer.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: Okay, gotcha. So it's like a, [00:28:00] a sandy layer or something like that. Yeah. Okay. Oh, interesting. Oh, cool. That's super cool. I mean, uh, kind of an amazing, I don't know, amazing thing. It's very, very cool and fun to think about. well, uh, Chris, I don't know. What do you think? That's a wrap for Oceans, and just remember...
Why are oceans salty?
Chris Bolhuis: That's right.
Dr. Jesse Reimink: That's a good, a good thing to ponder. Hey, that's a wrap for this episode. You can follow us on all the social medias, we're at planet geocast. You can go to our website, planetgeocast. com. There you can like, subscribe, find out more about us.
You can also [00:28:30] support us. We really appreciate it when people go there and do that. You can also head over to our Camp Geo app and download all of our past episodes, you can get access to our Yellowstone and Grand Canyon geology books there, as well as the climate book, which this episode, plus some images and some extra content is a part of there for a couple bucks.
Send us an email, planetgeocast at gmail. com. If you have any questions, we love getting those.
Chris Bolhuis: Cheers. [00:29:00]
