Weather of Arabia - We know that 71% of the earth's surface is covered with water, but imagine that there is a very huge amount of water hidden under the earth's crust equivalent to three times the size of the oceans on the surface! Here are the details.
After analyzing an extremely rare diamond believed to have formed some 410 miles beneath Botswana, an international team of researchers has concluded in a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience that the boundary between our planet's upper and lower mantle - a region known as the transition zone Hundreds of miles deep in the Earth's interior - it contains more trapped water and carbon dioxide than previously thought, equivalent to three times the volume of all oceans on Earth.
This discovery could help explain the origin of water on Earth. Specifically, it could help us pinpoint the source of seas and oceans and possibly help us better understand life on our planet.
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Scientists had already suspected that Earth's transition zone contained a lot of water after analyzing a similar diamond in 2014, but the latest research adds credence and new evidence to the theory.
Scientists had found that an amount of water was trapped inside the Earth's mantle or "mantle rock" (one of the Earth's layers) in a sponge-like state, which is not liquid, solid, or gas, but a fourth state instead, and a study on that physical state was published. alien to water.
Scientists reached those results at the time after studying earthquakes and discovering that seismographs were picking up shock waves below the surface of the earth. Later they were able to prove that water was trapped in the rock known as ringwoodite.
A study indicated that the high water storage capacity in the Earth's mantle (which has a thickness of 410 to 660 km) indicates the possibility of a huge reservoir of water.
Geophysicist Steve Jacobsen, one of the study's co-authors, said: "Ringwoodite rocks are like a sponge, as they absorb water greatly due to the crystal structure of Ringwoodite, which allows it to attract hydrogen and trap water inside it."
"This type of rock could contain a lot of water in the deep mantle," Jacobsen, who was part of the team behind the discovery, added. "I think we are finally seeing evidence of the entire Earth's water cycle, which may help explain the existence of That huge amount of liquid water on the surface of our planet... Scientists have been searching for this missing deep water for decades."
According to the recent study, if the rock contains only 1 percent of the water on the surface of the earth, this means that the volume of water held in these rocks within the mantle layer is three times the volume of water in the oceans due to the huge size of these rocks in the heart of the earth.
Some scientists argue that Earth's water likely came from asteroids or comets, which is the most prominent theory currently, as it indicates that the solar system at the beginning of its formation was very hostile to water of any kind, especially with the sun sending at the time huge amounts of intense ultraviolet radiation, which It can break down water molecules by removing hydrogen from the water molecule, according to NDTV.
This led scientists to believe that the ice may have formed farther out in the solar system, and that bodies carrying it (comets or asteroids) later collided with a cooler Earth over millions of years, first concentrating in the Earth's interior, getting trapped in rocks in the mantle, and then gradually being released. to the surface due to the movement of tectonic plates to form seas and oceans, according to geophysicist Steve Jacobsen, who was one of the scientists responsible for the discovery.
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