Let’s get it straight from the get-go: all water is already salty. Salt appears in seas and oceans thanks to rivers, which bring minerals from land with them. Rivers are considered fresh themselves only because their levels of salinity are much lower: movement doesn’t allow the salt to collect, and rains replenish them with fresh water. So technically, what we drink is not exactly fresh — there’s some salt in that water anyway. But if, for some reason, all water in the world became much saltier, we’d be in big trouble.

Let's take the Dead Sea, for example. The level of salt here is much higher than in any other reservoir on the planet: there’s so much of it that water would keep you afloat without any effort. But this curious effect is the only positive thing about it because almost no life is possible in such conditions. Only the sturdiest of bacteria can survive here: there’s no fish, no marine mammals, and no sea birds over the lake’s surface. Needless to say, if there was this much salt in every water body in the world, complex life would’ve never appeared in the first place. So what if all water on our planet was salty?

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