Adding a specular map causes transparency

I have an texture of earth and I want to add a specular map to only make the water shiny so I edited the alpha channel in GIMP to add in the map. Now, it works but it's made all the water white. In GIMP the water all looks transparent in the image but when it's uploaded, it's just white. I've tried checking alpha from grayscale in the import settings but that hasn't changed and I don't see why it would anyway. Any help?