Huge Underground "Ocean" Found Beneath Asia

National Geographic ^ | 2-27-2007 | Richard A Lovett

[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.)

[fanfan]

LOL, thanks for the ping.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks decimon!

[Mike Darancette]

Applied flour and there it was.

[SunkenCiv]

Amazingly, the earths water is really a miniscule amount | 5/15/2012 | thanks central_va.

The Louis Frank keyword:

• Astronomy Picture of the Day -- All the Water on Planet Earth
• Comet's water 'like that of Earth's oceans'
• Telescope shoots video of heavenly halo ("mystery flash" filmed from Mauna Kea, Hawaii)
• Clandestine comets found in main asteroid belt - Earth oceans origin
• Cosmic Hole-in-One Captured Over Antarctica
• Small Comets and Our Origins
• An Argument for the Cometary Origin of the Biosphere
• So, where did the water on Mars come from?