Seawater is, on average, 3.3 to 3.7 percent salt. The amount of salt varies from place to place. In areas where large quantities of freshwater are supplied by melting ice, rivers, or rainfall, such as the Arctic or Antarctic, the level of salinity is lower. Areas such as the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea have salt contents over 4.2 percent. If all the salt in the ocean were dried, it would form a mass of solid salt the size of Africa. Most of the ocean salt comes from processes of dissolving and leaking from the solid Earth over hundreds of millions of years. Some is the result of salty volcanic rock that flows up from a giant rift that runs through all the ocean’s basins.