Did you know that there is an ocean hidden deep in the Earth’s mantle?
Scientists reported evidence for potentially oceans worth of water deep beneath the United States, locked up in a type of mineral called Ringwoodite. The discovery may represent the planet’s largest water reservoir.
Ringwoodite
The study will help scientists understand Earth’s water cycle, and how the water is moved by the plate tectonics between the planet and interior reservoirs.
The interior of Earth, similar to the other terrestrial planets, is chemically divided into layers. The mantle is a layer between the crust and the outer core. Earth’s mantle is a silicate rocky shell with an average thickness of 2,886 kilometres (1,793 mi).
The deepest hole in the world ever dug is called Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia with a depth of more than 7.5 miles (12 kilometers)… So, reaching this ocean’s depth is almost impossible with the current technologies!
Did you also know that the ocean trapped inside the Earth is 3 times bigger than all the oceans we know combined together?
Geophysicist Steve Jacobsen said:
The Ringwoodite is like a sponge, soaking up water.
There is something very special about the crystal structure of ringwoodite that allows it to attract hydrogen and trap water. This mineral can contain a lot of water under conditions of the deep mantle. If just 1% of the weight of mantle rock located in the transition zone is H2O, that would be equivalent to nearly 3 times the amount of water in our oceans.
And this might suggest that the Earth’s water may have come from within, driven to the surface by geological activity, which contradicts with the widely accepted theory that water was deposited by icy comets hitting the forming planet.
