my 10-kilo bag of sea salt

I dragged out my 10-kilogram bag of sea salt (recently bought) to replenish the sea salt in my plastic container—the salt I use for my daily foot soaks. But when I took the heavy bag out of a closet and slammed it onto my dining table today, I immediately noticed a puddle of liquid under the bag, plus random fallen salt crystals (huge, chunky ones). Was this a natural occurrence, or had something unrelated sprung a leak somewhere? My next thought: Well, shit, if I'm storing this in my closet, what the hell's happening inside there? I rushed over to check, and sure enough, the bottom of the closet was a puddle of salty water. I held the sea-salt bag over the kitchenette sink, brushed off the salt crystals clinging to the exterior, then wiped the bag down with paper towels and bagged the sea-salt bag in two layers of plastic grocery bags. While that ought to temporarily solve the soaking problem, I still needed to find out what might be happening. Turns out there's no leak from anywhere else. The source of the water, it turns out, is the crazy atmospheric humidity in my apartment (I run my A/C for only about 60-90 minutes a day, in 30-minute bursts). 

Here's what's been going on according to the AI god:

Water at the bottom of a bag of sea salt is caused by a chemical process called deliquescence. Sea salt is naturally hygroscopic (moisture-absorbing), and unrefined salts often lack anti-caking agents. When exposed to high humidity, the salt absorbs so much airborne moisture that it begins to dissolve in it.

Here is a breakdown of why this happens and how to manage the salt:

• Natural Deliquescence: When the ambient humidity rises above roughly 75%, sea salt absorbs the moisture and liquefies into a concentrated brine pool.
• Trace Minerals: Unrefined sea salts often contain trace, mineral-rich brines (like calcium or magnesium chloride) that are highly deliquescent.
• Safety: The damp salt or the liquid at the bottom is perfectly safe to use for cooking, as it is just concentrated salt water.

Deliquescence. Lovely. So the salt bag has been absorbing my apartment's humidity; the water gathers at the bottom of the bag as salt water; the salt water seeps through the bag material; the water re-evaporates, thus leaving salt crystals outside the salt bag. Lovely.

And this is only going to continue through the summer. I'll keep losing salt unless I seal the bag, but I don't have a Ziploc that big, and I doubt I can make my 20-liter grocery bags that airtight. I guess I could transfer the salt to multiple Ziplocs and put paper towels inside each little bag to act as desiccants, changing the towels out now and then. Hmmm.

Something to do tomorrow, perhaps.