RESEARCHERS DISCOVER WATER RESERVOIR BENEATH THE EARTH’S SURFACE

Researchers from Washington University in the United States have discovered a mammoth water reservoir locked in rocks 400 to 800 miles beneath eastern Asia. Stretching from Indonesia to the northern tip of Russia, the water is estimated to be at least equal in volume to the Arctic Ocean. 

Researchers Michael Wysession, a seismologist, and Jesse Lawrence, his former graduate student, found the water while scanning seismic waves?waves generated by earthquakes traveling through the earth. Wysession believes that the reservoir was formed when a cold slab of the ocean floor sank thousands of miles into the Earth’s mantle.

The discovery supports the findings of Norman Sleep, a geophysicist at Stanford University.  Sleep said that when the planet was young, the ice and water from the earth’s surface melted down into the Earth’s mantle, where it evaporated from the heat and formed steam. Sleep further explains that underground water serves as a sort of lubricant that allows plates in the Earth’s crust to keep shifting at their present rate.