The idea of an underwater world has driven a lot of science fiction, but a group of researchers says it’s not far from the scientific truth. They discovered an area inside the Earth’s surface that is believed to hold much more water than the rest of the world’s oceans combined. The finding came about with the discovery of a diamond and could support a theory that has shaken conventional wisdom about what water looks like on the planet. Read on to find out what the scientists found and what implications it might have.
hour Goethe University In Frankfurt, Germany, geoscientists were investigating a diamond found 2100 feet 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 evidence to support what was previously just a theory that it is suspended deep within the planet’s crust, between the Earth’s upper and lower layers.
The depth at which the diamond is located – 660 meters or about 2,100 feet – is in the deepest part of the “transition zone”, the boundary layer that separates the Earth’s upper mantle from the lower mantle. Minerals found in areas lower in the transition zone – closer to the Earth’s core – are denser and less likely to act like tectonic plates closer to the earth’s surface. “These mineral transformations greatly inhibit rock movements in the mantle,” said Prof. Frank Brenker of the Geosciences Institute at Goethe University in Frankfurt. For example, mantle plumes—pillars of hot rock rising from the deep mantle—sometimes just below the transition zone. The movement of mass in the opposite direction also comes to a standstill.” Due to the density and static nature of this region, scientists were unsure how much water was there.
Until you analyze 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 said. “This also brings us one step closer to Jules Verne’s idea of an ocean inside the Earth.”
Scientists had previously theorized that because minerals (wadsleyite and ringwoodite) found deep within the Earth’s crust can store large amounts of water, the transition zone could potentially hold six times the amount of water in all of the planet’s oceans. “So we knew that the boundary layer has an enormous capacity to store water,” says Brenker. “However, we didn’t know if that was really the case.” Until now. It could be evidence that the water deep within the Earth is part of the overall water system of the planet.
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. It is believed that water formed further 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 will not hold.
