A few hundred million years ago, the waters of the ocean were still fresh enough to drink. It is the earth that contains the mineral salts one tastes in sea water. The salts are in all runoff, leached out of rock and soil. The runoff concentrates in rivers, which end up in the oceans -- or, as in the case of Mono and Great Salt Lake, in a closed-basin sumps up to seven times saltier than the sea. Once in the ocean, the salts have no place to go; the seas are stuck with them. When the water is evaporated, the salts remain behind; when the water falls as rain and becomes runoff again, a fresh batch of salts washes in.
~ Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, p. 455
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