Settled Science: "Earth may have underground 'ocean' three times that on surface"
Or as S. Cooper "B.S., M.S., M.A., Ph.D., Sc.D. OMG"* might say: "Good night puny human"
I'm starting to think we don't know Scheiße. From the Guardian:
Scientists say rock layer hundreds of miles down holds vast amount of water, opening up new theories on how planet formed
After decades of searching scientists have discovered that a vast
reservoir of water, enough to fill the Earth’s oceans three times over,
may be trapped hundreds of miles beneath the surface, potentially
transforming our understanding of how the planet was formed.
The
water is locked up in a mineral called ringwoodite about 660km (400
miles) beneath the crust of the Earth, researchers say. Geophysicist
Steve Jacobsen from Northwestern University in the US co-authored the
study published in the journal Science
and said the discovery suggested Earth’s water may have come from
within, driven to the surface by geological activity, rather than being
deposited by icy comets hitting the forming planet as held by the
prevailing theories.
“Geological processes on the Earth’s
surface, such as earthquakes or erupting volcanoes, are an expression of
what is going on inside the Earth, out of our sight,” Jacobsen said.
“I
think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle,
which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of
our habitable planet. Scientists have been looking for this missing
deep water for decades.”
Jacobsen and his colleagues are the first
to provide direct evidence that there may be water in an area of the
Earth’s mantle known as the transition zone. They based their findings
on a study of a vast underground region extending across most of the
interior of the US.
Ringwoodite acts like a sponge due to a crystal structure that makes it attract hydrogen and trap water.
If
just 1% of the weight of mantle rock located in the transition zone was
water it would be equivalent to nearly three times the amount of water
in our oceans, Jacobsen said.
The study used data from the
USArray, a network of seismometers across the US that measure the
vibrations of earthquakes, combined with Jacobsen’s lab experiments on
rocks simulating the high pressures found more than 600km underground.
It
produced evidence that melting and movement of rock in the transition
zone – hundreds of kilometres down, between the upper and lower mantles
– led to a process where water could become fused and trapped in the
rock.
The discovery is remarkable because most melting in the
mantle was previously thought to occur at a much shallower distance,
about 80km below the Earth’s surface....MORE
