There’s billions of life forms on there. Say a shrimp dies and isn’t eaten up or anything by scavengers, could it pickle over time? The way we pickle meats in a salt brine? The ocean is a salt brine in itself.
The ocean is absolutely PACKED with life like bacteria, viruses, and other microscopic organisms. Even if the salinity is high, it’s unlikely that you would get an ideal “pickling.” Hypothetically, if were there very few of those around for some reason, maybe? Maybe for a little bit. A more likely situation may be one where an organism was eventually fossilized due to being covered by something. And we ALL know being fossilized is better than being pickled, right?
If a dead thing would pickle, pretty much everything in the sea would end up pickled alive
Every multicellular creature lives in symbiosis with a plethora of bacteria, inside and outside of its system, those will always be the first to start decomposition. You’d need extreme conditions to sterilize those and avoid decomposition, and even then, there’s pretty much not a cubic millimeter in the ocean that isn’t filled with other bacteria and fungi.
Maybe in a brine pool but in most parts of the ocean the salt is not concentrated enough
out of curiosity what is the average salinity? We often use 0.85% saline to suspend organisms and red cells to keep osmotic pressure stable, I’m just curious if its around that level.
