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According to a seismic study, the Earth causes about three times more seawater than previously estimated, which has major consequences for the water cycle in the world. collisions of tectonic plates under the Mariana pit – the deepest oceanic trench in the world.
It is in the trench that the plate of the western Pacific Ocean slides under the Mariana plate and sinks deeply into the Earth's mantle while the plates converge slowly.
"People knew that the subduction zones could bring down the waters, but they did not know how much water," said senior author Chen Cai, of the University of Washington to St. Louis.
"This research shows that subduction zones move much more water into the depths of the Earth, many miles away than previously thought," Candace Major, program director at the Marine Science Division of the National Science Foundation.
For the study published in the journal Nature, the team listened for more than a year to the rumblings of the Earth – from ambient noise to earthquakes – to help from a network of 19 pbadive seismographs at the bottom of the ocean deployed across the Marianne. Trench, with seven seismographs based on islands.
They found that water from the ocean at the top of the plate flowed into the earth's crust and upper mantle along fault lines that bind the area where the plates meet and bend. . Then he is trapped.
Under certain conditions of temperature and pressure, chemical reactions force water in a non-liquid form, in the form of hydrated minerals – wet rocks – block water in the rock of the plate geological.
Then the plate continues to sink deeper and deeper into the earth's mantle, dragging the water with it.
The seismic images show that the hydrated rock zone at the Marianas Trench extends for a distance of 32.2 km below the study showed that the bottom of the sea was [19659003] for the region of the Mariana Trench alone, four times more subchannels than those calculated previously. These features can be extrapolated to predict conditions in other ocean trenches around the world.
Scientists believe that most of the water that falls in the trench comes back from the Earth into the atmosphere as water vapor when volcanoes move away to hundreds of kilometers.
But with revised water estimates, the amount of water entering the earth appears to greatly exceed the amount of water that comes out, note the researchers.
– IANS
rt / mag / sed
(This story was not edited by Business Standard staff and is generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)
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