Remains of an ancient oceanUntil 65 million years ago, a great ocean, the Tethys, separated India from Asia. There were no Himalayas and no Tibetan Plateau... A team led by Rob Van der Voo of the Department of Geological Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan has found signs of this ancient ocean deep beneath the Indian subcontinent... By reconstructing the paths taken by earthquake waves through the Earth, they have created a three-dimensional computer model of the interior of the Earth beneath India and the surrounding area.
by Paul Cooper
26 August 1999Earth's Interior May Contain Oceans Of Water, Geologist SaysAs a rule, rocks on earth are quite dry -- much drier than meteorites, for example, which also contain wadsleyite. Earth rocks generally contain only a small fraction of 1 percent of water. Wadsleyite is about 3.3 percent water. That may not seem like much, but given the amount of wadsleyite scientists think is in the earth-- it could be three to five times the amount of all the surface water on the planet, Smyth said. "It's possible the earth has this way of regulating the amount of water on the surface," Smyth said... The earth's oceans have existed for at least four billion years, and have been fairly constant in volume over the last 500 million years. These "inner oceans" may play a role in regulating that supply, Smyth said. In 1996 Smyth also discovered wadsleyite II, which may store water under even greater pressures at a lower portion of the transition zone.
ScienceDaily
December 17, 1997Earth could hold more waterThere is already thought to be several oceans' worth of water slightly higher in the mantle, at a depth of around 400-650 km. This region is called the transition zone, as it is between the upper and the lower mantle. The lower mantle's minerals can retain about a tenth as much water as the rocks above, Murakami's team finds. But because the volume of the lower mantle is much greater than that of the transition zone, it could hold a comparable amount of water... Any hydrogen in the rocks presumably comes from trapped water, an idea that other measurements support. The researchers found more hydrogen than previous experiments had led them to expect.
by Philip Ball
8 March 2002Inner Earth May Hold More Water Than the SeasBased on what they witnessed in their lab, the researchers concluded that more water probably exists deep within the Earth than is present on Earth's surface -- as much as five times more... Murakami and his colleagues reached their conclusion based on how much water they managed to dissolve under the experiment's extreme conditions in several types of material that make up much of the lower mantle. They used heat and pressure -- 25.5 gigapascals of it, or more than 250,000 times natural atmospheric pressure at sea level -- to create four mineral compounds that exist in the lower mantle... Earth's oceans make up just 0.02 percent of the planet's total mass. T his means the vast lower mantle could contain many times more water than floats on the planet's surface.
by Ben Harder
March 7, 2002
"the researchers concluded that more water probably exists deep within the Earth than is present on Earth's surface -- as much as five times more... "
Could this possibly mean that some water remains on (in) Venus?
Once we erect our Terraforming parasol shielding Venus, and let it cool off to a reasonable degree, we might be able to resuscitate an ocean or two.
Don't buy the real estate yet. Although you could put some of it in trust for your gggggggrandchildren.