Posted on 02/27/2007 3:16:42 PM PST by blam
Huge Underground "Ocean" Found Beneath Asia
Richard A. Lovett
for National Geographic News
February 27, 2007
A giant blob of water the size of the Arctic Ocean has been discovered hundreds of miles beneath eastern Asia, scientists report.
Researchers found the underground "ocean" while scanning seismic waves as they passed through Earth's interior.
But nobody will be exploring this sea by submarine. The water is locked in moisture-containing rocks 400 to 800 miles (700 to 1,400 kilometers) beneath the surface.
"I've gotten all sorts of emails asking if this is the water that burst out in Noah's flood," said the leader of the research team, Michael Wysession of Washington University in St. Louis.
"It isn't an ocean. [The water] is a very low percentage [of the rock], probably less than 0.1 percent."
Given the region's size, however, that's enough to add up to a vast amount of water.
Earthquakes Reveal "Ocean"
Wysession and former graduate student Jesse Lawrence discovered the damp spot by observing how seismic waves from distant earthquakes pass through Earth's mantle.
The wet zone, which runs from Indonesia to the northern tip of Russia, showed up as an area of relatively weak rock, causing the seismic waves to lose strength much more rapidly than elsewhere (see map of Asia.)
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
Never heard of ley lines? ;’)
This article is an insult to the Arctic Ocean.
Seismic waves pass differently through oil than water, so the identification as water is probably accurate ... oil would show up slightly differently.
Given the west coasts problems with having enough water to go around...what are the odds Governor Arnold will invade Asia?
I can hear the chants now;
No war for Water!
Thanks, Steve!
That’s a much better illustration, and it probably makes the point more accurately.
The “deep damp” appears to be associated with the Pacific plate “ring of fire” and may well be an artifact of subduction zones.
I wasn’t aware there was a South Pacific “Hot Spot”, but then there is that new island off of Tonga. Hmm.
It’s hard to keep up with everything in Plate Tectonics. Things move so rapidly!
Are you kidding? I helped lay a few of them.
Note the upsurge in the south pacific is much larger then the upsurge that is now starting to surface around Indonesia. I wish I knew how fast these blobs are moving.
The small sliver of tectonic plate off the coast of Sumatra that was the cause of the big tsunami seems to be a thorn in the paw of plate tectonics.
But the area looks like a subduction zone to me.
I’d recommend that any nation with a Pacific coast invest in tsunami warning equipment for their shore communities. It’s cheaper than cleanup.
On the whole, Earth is a very dangerous place, but Mars is such a fixer-upper. It’s like: where would you rather live, a dangerous, crime-ridden, ghettoized city, or the 1930’s Oklahoma dust bowl?
Not much air on mars, the water we find would be the only air we could produce. ha :)
“The wet zone, which runs from Indonesia to the northern tip of Russia..”
I can remember discussions with ex’s about who should sleep in the “wet zone.”
Wouldn’t that be the water table?
[a personal favorite] “Are you an overdue library book? Because you’ve got ‘fine’ written all over you.”
Please don’t distract me. I’m continent surfing.
;’) Hey, it’s not my fault. [rimshot!]
I get your drift.
Quake thinkin’.
Note: this topic is from February 2007. This is a re-ping, because I got thinking about something else, found this, and realized it's an apropos sidebar to the Eocene climate topic just posted today by decimon. And sometime this week, related to both these, we either had a new article or a revived old topic about, uh, dang, I can't remember now what it was about.
The *fault* is all mine.
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Ha! Wait'll ya see the moon thread: Moon's interior water casts doubt on formation theory
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