Scientists Discover Water Deep inside the Earth's Crust

Scientists Discover Water Deep inside the Earth's Crust

Scientists have located a massive reservoir of water nearly 3 times the size of the ocean hundreds of miles under the surface of the planet. Scientists from the Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico have researched and provided evidence for the potential of water deep within the earth.

This water is not in liquid form as the ingredients for water are locked deep within the earth's mantle. The discovery represents the largest water reservoir beneath the planet. The existence of liquid water on the surface is what makes our planet habitable. Earth or the blue planet is full of many mysteries. In fact, there is so much about our planet that remains to be revealed, given its untapped wealth of resources. Scientists have been trying to figure out for long about how much water may be cycling between the earth's surface and inner reservoirs through plate tectonics.

Northwestern University geophysicist Steve Jacobsen and seismologist Brandon Schmandt from the University of New Mexico have found deep pockets of magma at about 400 miles beneath North America. This is a likely indication and signature of the presence of water at such depths.

This indicates that water from the surface of our plant may have been driven to greater depths by plate tectonics. This is causing the partial melting of the rocks located deep within the mantle. Scientist Steve Jacobsen remarked that this may finally present the research evidence for the complete earth water cycle. This even provides an explanation about the huge amounts of water covering the surface of the earth. Scientists have been searching for the deep water for decades.

It has long been speculated by scientists that the water is within the rocky layer of the earth's mantle. The water was hypothesised to be located within the difference between the lower and upper mantle. This is at depths between 250 to 410 miles. Jacobsen and Schmandt are the first to have actually provided scientific evidence for water in this area of the mantle. This is known as the transition zone on the regional scale.

This study involved Jacobsen's lab research where he studied the mantle rock under simulated high pressure of as much as 400 miles beneath the earth's surface. This corresponds with Schmandt's observation along with vast amounts of seismic data from seismometers across the US. The United States Array has a dense network of more than 2000 seismometers across the country.

They converged their study to provide evidence of the melting that occurred 400 miles deep in the earth. This process is thought to be the result of H20 stored in the earth's mantle rocks. The first solid clue of water deep within the earth was when a mineral ringwoodite located inside a diamond from a volcano in Brazil was found to contain a lot of water bound in solid form within the mineral. With such findings, there are interesting implications for those who want to know more about water, the most important element for sustaining life.