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Indo-Asian News Service
November 16, 2018 at 10:10 am IST
The Earth drags about three times as much seawater as previously thought, according to one seismic study, with major consequences for the world water cycle.
The results showed that the loss of seawater was due to idle collisions of tectonic plates under the Mariana pit – the deepest ocean trench in the world.
The plate is located where the plate of the western Pacific Ocean slides under the plate and the wells of Mariana sink deep into the Earth's mantle while the plates converge slowly.
"People knew that the subduction zones could bring down the water, but they did not know how much water," said senior author Chen Cai, of L & 39. University of Washington. in St. Louis.
Representative Image
"This research shows that subduction zones move a lot more water into the depths of the Earth, many kilometers from the surface than one's thought previously, "added Candace Major, a Director of the Division of Marine Science at the National Science Foundation
For the study published in the journal Nature, the team listened for over a year to the rumblings from earth – from ambient noise to earthquakes – using a network of 19 pbadive seismographs at the bottom of the ocean deployed in the Mariana Trench, as well as seven seismographs based on islands.
They found that the ocean water at the top of the plate flowed into the earth's crust and the upper mantle along the fault lines that line the area where the plates are. collide and bend. Then she is trapped.
Under certain temperature and pressure conditions, chemical reactions force water into a non-liquid form in the form of hydrated minerals – wet rocks – blocking water in the rock of the geological plate.
The plate continues to sink deeper and deeper into the earth's mantle, bringing with it water.
Seismic images show that the hydrated rock zone in the Marianas Trench extends for nearly 32.2 km under the seabed, the study showed.
For the Mariana Trench region alone, four times more water subducts than those previously calculated. These features can be extrapolated to predict conditions in other ocean trenches around the world.
Scientists believe that most of the water that falls into 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 seems to greatly exceed the amount of water that comes out, the researchers note.
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