Put salt (aka sodium chloride) in your pasta water and you’ll end up with delicious spaghetti. Put pure sodium in it instead… and it will explode.

It’s the latest edition of “The Element of Surprise,” our occasional series about the hidden stories behind the periodic table’s most unassuming atoms, isotopes, and molecules. This time we’re talking all about sodium.

It’s the periodic table’s saltiest element. It powers your body like a battery and you need it to survive. So why is too much of it bad for you? Plus, how did salt help the North win the Civil War?

Featuring Raychelle Burks, Trisha Pasricha, Ashley Dumas.

Produced by Felix Poon. For full credits and transcript, visit outsideinradio.org.

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LINKS

Watch a 1947 newsreel of the US Army disposing thousands of pounds of pure sodium into a lake in Washington State, causing massive explosions.

See images of the Slanic Salt Mine in Romania and the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland, now major tourist sites.

Check out Theodore Gray’s “Sodium Party” YouTube video series where he drops sodium chunks of various sizes into water to observe how they explode. Here’s the first video in the series.
Want to learn more about the role of salt throughout human history? Read Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History.

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