How do you get water when you are on an island in the ocean with no spring? Is it possible to drink seawater and somehow adapt it for drinking?
I once asked this question in school when I was interning there as a physics teacher. To which the students amicably replied, "To drink seawater, you have to boil it!"
As you can imagine, this will not work. Yes, the microorganisms will die. But the water will become even less fresh. After all, it will leave with the steam, and the salt will be deposited. In other words, it will only get worse.
The option of waiting for rain doesn't work either. In the tropics, it does not rain so often - more often it rolls there torrential occasional showers.
So, let's break down the practical ways that you can do something with seawater to make it drinkable.
You can't drink water from the ocean - it will be fatal quickly. The reason is simple - there is too much salt in seawater. It is too much for the human metabolism. To remove it, you will use more water than you would get together with seawater.
Let's go over briefly the biology of the process called osmosis. It is the process by which water flows through cell walls. This flow always goes from a less diluted to a more diluted solution. And if you drink very salty water, the flow of water will be directed outward from the cells. So the cells will begin to die from lack of water.
This is dehydration, which will kill you quickly. I previously wrote an article about what to do if you find yourself in the open ocean and how much seawater you can drink and survive. You will find a link to it at the end of this article.
Whatever you do, don't boil the water. It will only hasten your demise, as boiling will simply increase the salt concentration. But steam is already a good clue, because it is water, only in gaseous form.
And today, we're going to have some tips from naturalist and survival expert Gary Meaney, which he cited in his Wilderness Attractions group on Quora.
Essentially, seawater can be turned into fresh water in two ways.
Freezing. The salts won't freeze and you can drink melt water. But on uninhabited islands in the ocean, there is usually no such option - temperatures are much higher than zero.
Distillation. This is the distillation of water by evaporation. The first vessel is heated, and the salts settle here. The vapor goes into the tank where it will cool and you will just have to collect the condensate.
You can desalinate salt water if you have the right equipment with you on the island.
The simplest and easiest method to use is pictured above. The main thing you will need are two empty glass bottles and a heat source.
The trays in the photo are used as heat sinks and stabilizers to keep the bottles from rolling around. But this is not necessary.
Place the two bottles on the same level so that their holes are touching. One of them is under heat.
The fire will make the seawater boil. All pathogens will die. And the water in vapor form will begin to escape into the other bottle. Here it will cool down and become liquid again. But without the salt, which will settle in the first bottle.
What to do if you don't have a fire.
You can do the same thing with two bottles, a tube and no fire.
Bury one bottle up to the neck and leave the other in the sun. Fill the other one half full with seawater and connect them to the tube.
The buried bottle will slowly fill with evaporated water because of the difference in temperature.
Another way is to pour water on a raised tray inside a plastic bag. You fill the bag with air and tie it up. The water evaporates and the salt remains in the tray. The water then condenses inside the bag.
If you have a tarp, you can put a canopy and boil water under it. The water condenses on the tarp and drains into the pan.
But it turns out that ordinary seawater can still be drunk. But just a little bit. During the experiment, biologist Alain Bombard swam in the ocean for 65 days and survived, and his observations were recorded.
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