Abstract
HAD I been writing a book on the subject I should have first described the crust of the earth, some 20 miles in thickness, and then gone on to point out how, by the processes of destruction and denudation, this is continually being washed first into the rivers and finally into the sea, much of it going into solution. As the poet tells us, “even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea”. The quantity of any one constituent of the crust in a thousand parts of sea-water is infinitely small and indeed many are only detectable by the most refined methods of the chemist, but there is so much ocean in the world that in the aggregate it contains many tens of thousands of tons of even the very rarest constituent.
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ARMSTRONG, E. MINERALS, OLD AND NEW FROM THE SEA*. Nature 150, 453–455 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/150453a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/150453a0
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