Steven Donner, Age 11, Of Tucson, Ariz., For His Question;

Were the oceans ever filled with fresh water?

The salty chemicals in the sea are d1ssolved from the land by streams and running rivers. This robbery has been going on for ages, and the sea is getting saltier all the time. In the past, the oceans were less salty, and if we go back far enough we come to a time when the sea water was fresh or almost fresh.

Millions of tons of salts are dumped into the seas every year, and experts have tried to estimate how long it took to make the seas as salty as they are today. At one time this was used to estimate the age of the earth itself. It was thought that the rivers must have taken 100 million years to add all these chemicals to the oceans. Now the experts think it took much longer and that there was some salt in the seas at least a billion years ago.