Posted on 07/31/2015 1:22:24 PM PDT by Red Badger
Workers digging a well for underground water are dwarfed by the sand dunes of the Taklimakan Desert, 13 September 2003, outside of Tazhong, in China's northwest Xinjiang province.
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Chinese scientists have discovered what could be a huge hidden ocean underneath one of the driest places on earth, the South China Morning Post reported on 30 July.
The Tarim basin in northwestern Xinjiang, China, is one of the driest places on Earth, but the vast amount of salt water concealed underneath could equal 10 times the water found in all five of the Great Lakes in the US.
"This is a terrifying amount of water," said professor Li Yan, who led the study at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital.
"Never before have people dared to imagine so much water under the sand. Our definition of desert may have to change," he told the South China Morning Post.
Scientists had long suspected that a vast amount of melt water from nearby mountains had slipped beneath the basin, but the exact amount of water remained unknown.
Accidental discovery
Li's team made the discovery by accident. They had actually been looking for carbon dioxide, which is absorbed in certain areas - such as forests and oceans - called "carbon sinks."
Scientists study carbon sinks to gain a greater understanding of climate change.
Around 10 years ago, the team discovered that carbon dioxide had been disappearing into the basin for 10 years, but could not understand why.
After measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in samples from nearly 200 locations across the desert and comparing them to the carbon dioxide in melt water, they were able to calculate how much water had flowed into the basin.
"Our estimate is a conservative figure. The actual amount could be larger," Li told the paper.
The team will now work with other research scientists to see if other underground "oceans" could potentially exist underneath other deserts.
Li said it is likely large amounts of water will be found underneath the deserts, as the amount of carbon they potentially hold could be a trillion tonnes - the same amount of "missing" carbon on the planet.
The Creation of Man and Woman
4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.
5 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— 7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
There will be blood.
/jk
Looks like you don’t need heavy equipment when you have a billion manual laborers.
“terrifying”??
Does he think there will be a war for that salt water someday?
The ocean still has plenty
Uh, the Great Lakes are FRESH water.
I thought NASA said the world was running out of water.
This briny solution will not turn the desert green without desalinization. That could occur by using the sand as a filter. As the water rises it is filtered until it can be taken up by plants. Various estimates have determined that substantially more water exists at depth than is in all the oceans.
Just like food production, water scarcity is political, not natural.
Don’t wake up Godzilla!
Interesting abstract of geological conditions pertinent to your article.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026481721200222X
Paleozoic fault systems of the Tazhong Uplift, Tarim Basin, China
Wow, that alien has braces
Well, there goes another old saying.
“For all the tea in China” will now be “For all the salt water in China”.
Did they find any rocks? Every time I dig, I find rocks. Big ones.
GOD already said there was water under the desserts. It’s in the BOOK. That’s the way it will be.
PSALM 24
1 The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,
the world, and all who live in it;
2 for he founded it on the seas
and established it on the waters.
Translation: "They're still buying our scam, let's go for more grants".
So, isn’t this one of the unforeseen reasons why the global warming forecasts have been woefully wrong? And why further alarmist propaganda is also wrong? If the planet is naturally absorbing “excess” carbon instead of dumping in the atmosphere, and that effect being totally missed by the forecasts, then this collapses the whole reason of the alarm!
The 1984 movie and the book were totally different. There was no rain at the end of Dune book.....................
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