Many different sci-fi stories include the idea of an underwater world. But a group of researchers says this isn’t far from the scientific truth, and they say they’ve discovered an area deep within the Earth where there is much more water than the rest of the oceans combined.
This finding came about with the discovery of a diamond and may support a theory that has shaken conventionally accepted knowledge of what water looks like on the planet.
At Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, geoscientists were investigating a diamond found 640 meters underground in Botswana, Africa. When analyzing the contents of the stone, they found that it contained a large amount of water. The high volume of water in diamond is seen as evidence to support what was previously only a theory of an area of water suspended deep within the planet’s crust, between the Earth’s upper and lower layers.
The depth at which the diamond is located (640 meters) is in the deepest part of the “transition zone”, the boundary layer that separates the Earth’s upper mantle from the lower mantle. Deeper in the transition zone, that is, closer to the Earth’s core, minerals are denser and less likely to act like tectonic plates closer to the Earth’s surface. Professor of Geosciences at Goethe University in Frankfurt. “These mineral transformations greatly inhibit rock movements in the mantle,” says Frank Brenker. Mass movement in the opposite direction also stops.” Due to the density and static nature of this region, scientists were unsure how much water was there.
However, a new door seems to have been opened with the analysis of the diamond. Using advanced spectroscopy, the researchers found that the diamond contains “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 significant amount of water,” Brenker says. “This also brings us one step closer to Jules Verne’s idea of an ocean inside the Earth.”
Scientists previously theorized that the transition zone could potentially hold six times the amount of water in all of the planet’s oceans, as minerals found deep within the Earth’s crust — wadsleyite and ringwoodite — could store large amounts of water. “So we knew that the boundary layer had an enormous capacity to store water. However, we didn’t know if it was really like that,” Brenker says. This could be proof that water deep within the Earth is part of the planet’s overall water system.
The discovery could join others in reviewing ideas about where Earth’s water comes from. The dominant theory is that the young planet was too hot to develop water naturally. The water is thought to have formed further away in the solar system and was then delivered to the planet by comets or asteroids hitting the surface. But if there is water deep within the planet’s transit zone, this theory may be out of date.
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