Scientists Discover A Vast Ocean Beneath The Earth’s Surface Amazing Research

Scientists Discover A Vast Ocean Beneath The Earth’s Surface

 

The idea of ​​an underwater world has sparked much science fiction, but a group of researchers says it’s not too far from scientific truth. They have discovered an area within the Earth’s surface that is believed to contain several times more water than the rest of the Earth’s oceans combined. The discovery was made through the discovery of diamonds and could support a theory that has shattered conventional wisdom about how water formed on the planet. Read on to find out what scientists found and what implications it could have.

At Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, geologists examined a diamond found more than 2,100 feet underground in Botswana, Africa. Analyzing the contents of the stone, they found that it contained a large amount of water. The sheer volume of water in diamonds is evidence that supports a theory—formerly just a theory—that a vast ocean hung deep in the planet’s crust between the upper and lower layers of the Earth.

The depth at which the diamonds were found — 660 meters, or about 2,100 feet — lies in the deepest part of the “transition zone,” the boundary layer that separates Earth’s upper mantle from the lower mantle. Minerals in lower regions of the transition zone — closer to the Earth’s core — are denser and less likely to move closer to the Earth’s surface like plate tectonics.

“These mineral shifts severely impede the rock movements in the mantle,” says Professor Frank Brinker from the Institute for Geosciences at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. For example, mantle plumes — plumes of hot rock rising up from the deep mantle — sometimes end just below the transition zone. The movement of the mass in the opposite direction also stops.”Because of the density and stationary nature of this area, scientists weren’t sure how much water is there.

They even analyzed diamonds. Using advanced spectroscopy, the researchers found that diamonds contain ringwoodite, a mineral with a high water content. “In this study, we showed that the transition zone is not a dry sponge, but contains a lot of water,” says Brinker. “This also brings us a step closer to Jules Verne’s idea of ​​an ocean inside the earth.”

Scientists had previously hypothesized that the transition zone probably contains six times as much water as all of the planet’s oceans, because minerals deep in the Earth’s crust — wadsleyite and ringwoodite — can store large amounts of water. “We learned that the boundary layer has an enormous capacity to store water,” says Brinker. “However, we didn’t know if she actually did it.” until now. It could be evidence that deep inside the Earth, water is part of the planet’s overall water system.

This discovery could join others in revising ideas for Earth’s water source. The prevailing theory is that the young planet was too hot for water to evolve naturally. It is believed that water formed in the solar system and then reached the planet through comets or asteroids crashing onto the surface. But if the water were deep in the planet’s transition zone, this theory would not hold.

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