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The world's oldest water, which is locked deep within the Earth's crust, is present at a far greater volume than was thought, scientists report. The liquid, some of which is billions of years old, is found many kilometres beneath the ground. Researchers estimate there is about 11m cubic kilometres (2.5m cu miles) of it - more water than all the world's rivers, swamps and lakes put together. The study was presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting. It has also been published in the journal Nature. The team found that the water was reacting with the rock to release...

A team of researchers revealed evidence of an unknown geochemical pathway used by the Earth to sequester water deep within, releasing small amounts through plate tectonics in a process that feeds our oceans "from within," Ohio State University reported.

A definitive geological timeline shows that a series of massive volcanic explosions 66 million years ago spewed enormous amounts of climate-altering gases into the atmosphere immediately before and during the extinction event that claimed Earth's non-avian dinosaurs, according to new research from Princeton University. A primeval volcanic range in western India known as the Deccan Traps, which were once three times larger than France, began its main phase of eruptions roughly 250,000 years before the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, extinction event, the researchers report in the journal Science. For the next 750,000 years, the volcanoes unleashed more than 1.1 million cubic...

It contains one of the biggest and brightest stars in our galaxy, weighing at least 90 times the mass of the sun. The Eta Carinae star system, however, also has a dark side - it could bring the end of life on Earth. However, the good news is that experts say this is 'extremely' unlikely - but cannot rule it out.

The continuing search for a commercial plane missing for more than six months has led to new ocean discoveries that could save countless lives in the event of catastrophic tsunamis.While conducting the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 jet that disappeared in March with more than 200 souls on board, Australian scientists have uncovered underwater volcanoes and ridges within the depths of the Southern Indian Ocean.Before being prompted by the search efforts, radars and other technologies had yet to delve that deep into the area of the ocean off the western coast of Australia. However, the region is not...

Upon closer inspection, you would find that this is no random collection of bones, but rather is a deliberately constructed roadway delineated by the towering rib bones (some in excess of five metres high and weighing 300 kg), and dotted with huge whale skulls and large square pits dug into the permafrost. It would be a perplexing sight indeed.

First terrestrial discovery of an extremely rare mineral called ringwoodite confirms theory about huge water ‘reservoirs’ 410 to 660 km beneath the surface of our planet, says a team of researchers led by Prof Graham Pearson from the University of Alberta, Canada.

Scientists say rock layer hundreds of miles down holds vast amount of water, opening up new theories on how planet formed After decades of searching scientists have discovered that a vast reservoir of water, enough to fill the Earth’s oceans three times over, may be trapped hundreds of miles beneath the surface, potentially transforming our understanding of how the planet was formed. The water is locked up in a mineral called ringwoodite about 660km (400 miles) beneath the crust of the Earth, researchers say. Geophysicist Steve Jacobsen from Northwestern University in the US co-authored the study published in the journal...

In what could quench the thirst of billions of people in the future, researchers have discovered our planet's largest water reservoir 640 km beneath our feet - bound up in rock deep in the earth's mantle. This water is not in a form familiar to us - it is not liquid, ice or vapour. This fourth form is water trapped inside the molecular structure of the minerals in the mantle rock. Scientists have been looking for this missing deep water for decades," explained geophysicist Steve Jacobsen from Northwestern University.

Scientists Discover Massive Freshwater Reserves Underneath The Ocean Floor Agence France Presse Dec. 5, 2013, 7:22 AM Australian researchers said Thursday they had established the existence of vast freshwater reserves trapped beneath the ocean floor which could sustain future generations as current sources dwindle. Lead author Vincent Post, from Australia's Flinders University, said that an estimated 500,000 cubic kilometres (120,000 cubic miles) of low-salinity water had been found buried beneath the seabed on continental shelves off Australia, China, North America and South Africa. "The volume of this water resource is a hundred times greater than the amount we've extracted from...

(A few years back, Professor Stephen Oppenheimer wrote a book titled "Eden In The East" where he proposed that our culture flowed from east to west instead of west to east. Here's a rebuttal)Cultural diffusion from East to West? 2014/01/12 Oppenheimer’s theory is that “ … the roots of the great flowering of civilisation in the fertile crescent of the Ancient Near East lay in the sinking shorelines of Southeast Asia. The Sumerians and Egyptians themselves wrote about the skilled wise men from the East, a fact often dismissed as the embellishment of a fertile imagination.” Purely as an aside,...

Researchers at Northwestern University have found evidence for a massive reservoir of water deep within the Earth's mantle. The reservoir, which is said to be three times the volume of the oceans on the surface, is contained within highly-pressurized rock known as ringwoodite. The scientists hope that their findings, recently published in the journal Science, can shed light on where Earth's oceans came from. THREE TIMES THE VOLUME OF THE OCEANS ON EARTH'S SURFACE The team, led by mineralogist Steven Jacobsen, used an array of 2000 seismometers to study how seismic waves generated by earthquakes move through the Earth's interior....

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have shown that deep sea fault zones could transport much larger amounts of water from the Earth’s oceans to the upper mantle than previously thought.Water is carried mantle by deep sea fault zones which penetrate the oceanic plate as it bends into the subduction zone.  Subduction, where an oceanic tectonic plate is forced beneath another plate, causes large earthquakes such as the recent Tohoku earthquake, as well as many earthquakes that occur hundreds of kilometers below the Earth’s surface.Seismic modellingSeismologists at Liverpool have estimated that over the age of the Earth, the Japan subduction...

Scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean. The discovery marks the first time such a large body of water has found in the planet’s deep mantle. The finding, made by Michael Wysession, a seismologist at Washington State University in St. Louis, and his former graduate student Jesse Lawrence, now at the University of California, San Diego, will be detailed in a forthcoming monograph to be published by the American Geophysical Union. Looking down deep The pair analyzed more than...

Explanation: Why do some places on Earth have higher gravity than others? Sometimes the reason is unknown. To help better understand the Earth's surface, sensitive measurments by the orbiting satellites GRACE and CHAMP were used to create a map of Earth's gravitational field. Since a center for studying this data is in Potsdam, Germany, and since the result makes the Earth look somewhat like a potato, the resulting geoid has been referred to as the Potsdam Gravity Potato. High areas on this map, colored red, indicate areas where gravity is slightly stronger than usual, while in blue areas gravity is...

The Cimbrian flood (or Cymbrian flood) was a large-scale incursion of the North Sea in the region of the Jutland peninsula (Denmark) in the period 120 to 114 BC, resulting in a permanent change of coastline with much land lost. The flood was caused by one or several very strong storm(s). A high number of people living in the affected area of Jutland drowned, and the flooding apparently set off a migration of the Cimbri tribes previously settled there (Lamb 1991)... The Cimbri were a tribe from Northern Europe, who, together with the Proto-Germanic Teutones and the Ambrones threatened the...

It's not clear what's happened,probably another meteorite explodes, Sverdlovsk region,Russia Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=bf3_1416311834#dyTzQBMp3dP5Gcue.99

Asteroid sourced hydrogen and oxygen will literally and figuratively fuel expansion of the space economy by providing a locally sourced fuel resource that will change how industry operates in space. While existing satellites cannot be refueled directly today, space tugs fueled by asteroids that are currently being developed, will maneuver Geostationary satellites into their assigned orbit. Thus, keeping them operating and generating revenue far beyond their current life expectancy. Water from asteroids can also be used for a plethora of other applications beyond fuels in space. It can be consumed, used as a radiation shield for humans during deep space...

The question about the origin of oceans on Earth is one of the most important questions with respect to the formation of our planet and the origin of life. The most popular theory is that water was brought by impacts of comets and asteroids. Data from the Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis (ROSINA) instrument aboard the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft indicate that terrestrial water did not come from comets like 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The findings were published today in the journal Science. Researchers agree that water must have been delivered to Earth by small bodies at a later...