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 ...
I'll let you know when my daughters get there. They've been digging for China for three years at the beach.
Hypothetically, if a hole was dug through the diameter of the world (so from the United States, the hole would open someplace in the southern hemisphere near the Indian Ocean), if a guy jumped in, wouldn't he sort of get stuck in the middle rather than pop out the other end?
So that's where I left it!
Can Mars have this kind of formation sub-surface?
ROTFL!
I thought the same thing!
I don't think you could find a BOP big enough to contain the pressures. BOP's that size are the mountains that volcanoes form.
I never thought of that. I'll have to equip the girls with anti-gravity boots before they jump through their hole.
Haliburton already has those contracts locked up.....LOL
""It isn't an ocean. [The water] is a very low percentage [of the rock], probably less than 0.1 percent.""
But that didn't stop the author from using "Ocean" in the title.
Must have been there first time...
Puts a new slant on surfing down under.
Well by the time he got to the middle he would of melted away, if that wouldnt have happened gravity would crush him to a pretty small size and then instead of winging it out the other side you would circle endlessly in the center.
You'd need some really lightweight drill rod and would still need a hell of a lot of holdback.
I think that his answer indicates that he either is a creationist, or at the least has studied the issue sufficiently to understand all the implications of the question.
A stately pleasure dome decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river ran,
Down to a sunless sea..."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Consider the pressure; It can't be vapor, that's for sure.
ping
Remind me again how deep go the continents drifting in plate tectonics. ... Are these 'wet rocks' at the boundaries or interiors of plates?
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