Massive 'ocean' discovered towards Earth's core

S

Sir Hobbleton Scotch

Veteran-5
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25723-massive-ocean-discovered-towards-earths-core.html#.U5tl4CgVfws said:
A reservoir of water three times the volume of all the oceans has been discovered deep beneath the Earth's surface. The finding could help explain where Earth's seas came from.

The water is hidden inside a blue rock called ringwoodite that lies 700 kilometres underground in the mantle, the layer of hot rock between Earth's surface and its core.

The huge size of the reservoir throws new light on the origin of Earth's water. Some geologists think water arrived in comets as they struck the planet, but the new discovery supports an alternative idea that the oceans gradually oozed out of the interior of the early Earth.

"It's good evidence the Earth's water came from within," says Steven Jacobsen of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The hidden water could also act as a buffer for the oceans on the surface, explaining why they have stayed the same size for millions of years.

Jacobsen's team used 2000 seismometers to study the seismic waves generated by more than 500 earthquakes. These waves move throughout Earth's interior, including the core, and can be detected at the surface. "They make the Earth ring like a bell for days afterwards," says Jacobsen.

By measuring the speed of the waves at different depths, the team could figure out which types of rocks the waves were passing through. The water layer revealed itself because the waves slowed down, as it takes them longer to get through soggy rock than dry rock.

Jacobsen worked out in advance what would happen to the waves if water-containing ringwoodite was present. He grew ringwoodite in his lab, and exposed samples of it to massive pressures and temperatures matching those at 700 kilometres down.

Sure enough, they found signs of wet ringwoodite in the transition zone 700 kilometres down, which divides the upper and lower regions of the mantle. At that depth, the pressures and temperatures are just right to squeeze the water out of the ringwoodite. "It's rock with water along the boundaries between the grains, almost as if they're sweating," says Jacobsen.

acobsen's finding supports a recent study by Graham Pearson of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Pearson studied a diamond from the transition zone that had been carried to the surface in a volcano, and found that it contained water-bearing ringwoodite, the first strong evidence that there was lots of water in the transition zone (Nature, doi.org/s6h).

"Since our initial report of hydrous ringwoodite, we've found another ringwoodite crystal, also containing water, so the evidence is now very strong," says Pearson.

So far, Jacobsen only has evidence that the watery rock sits beneath the US. He now wants to find out if it wraps around the entire planet.

"We should be grateful for this deep reservoir," says Jacobsen. "If it wasn't there, it would be on the surface of the Earth, and mountain tops would be the only land poking out."
Click to expand...
 
  • Like
Reactions: |V|
I blame global [strike]cooling[/strike] [strike]warming[/strike] [strike]climate change[/strike] climate disruption
 
JoMo said:
They are too reductive.
Click to expand...

reductionism is when v smart people attempt to explain very complicated things by breaking them down into parts, explaining them each in turn, and then describing how they all fit together into a whole

reductivism is when idiots take extremely complex things and boil them down into good vs evil or left vs right

newscientist are v smart so u can figure out which they do :roller:
 
Posted about this yesterday on the Aether Force FB Page. I used the Physics.org story though.

New evidence for oceans of water deep in the Earth

Al'Muktar said:
reductionism is when v smart people attempt to explain very complicated things by breaking them down into parts, explaining them each in turn, and then describing how they all fit together into a whole

reductivism is when idiots take extremely complex things and boil them down into good vs evil or left vs right

newscientist are v smart so u can figure out which they do :roller:
Click to expand...

New Scientist is a cool rag.

Well if you can not explain something in a simple manner you do not understand what you are trying to explain. :shrug:
 
Last edited:
beltaine1 said:
Well if you can not explain something in a simple manner you do not understand what you are trying to explain. :shrug:
Click to expand...

yep 100% true and what reductionism is all about

but trying to explain, for example, scholastic underachievement amongst ethnic minority children as being to do with 'black parents not valuing education', or 9/11 being about brown people 'hating america's freedoms', that's reductivist and very very bad :roller:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top