Archive for November 21, 2019

Earth Is Sucking Down Way More Water Than We Thought, And No One’s Sure Where It’s Going

Slow-motion collisions of tectonic plates under the ocean drag about three times more water down into the deep Earth than previously believed, according to a seismic study that spans the Mariana Trench.

The observations from the deepest ocean trench in the world have important implications for the global water cycle, researchers say.

“People knew that subduction zones could bring down water, but they didn’t know how much water,” says Chen Cai, who recently completed his doctoral studies at Washington University in St. Louis and is first author of the paper, which appears in Nature. Read more