{"id":6915,"date":"2019-08-30T12:24:10","date_gmt":"2019-08-30T07:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cawater-info.net\/all_about_water\/en\/?p=6915"},"modified":"2019-08-29T13:33:23","modified_gmt":"2019-08-29T08:33:23","slug":"earth-is-sucking-down-way-more-water-than-we-thought-and-no-ones-sure-where-its-going","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.cawater-info.net\/all_about_water\/en\/?p=6915","title":{"rendered":"Earth Is Sucking Down Way More Water Than We Thought, And No One\u2019s Sure Where It\u2019s Going"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The observations from the deepest ocean trench in the world have important implications for the global water cycle, researchers say.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople knew that subduction zones could bring down water, but they didn\u2019t know how much water,\u201d 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\u00a0Nature.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis research shows that subduction zones move far more water into Earth\u2019s deep interior\u2014many miles below the surface\u2014than previously thought,\u201d says Candace Major, a program director in the National Science Foundation\u2019s Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the study.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe results highlight the important role of subduction zones in Earth\u2019s water cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPrevious estimates vary widely in the amount of water that is subducted deeper than 60 miles,\u201d says Douglas A. Wiens, professor of earth and planetary sciences and Cai\u2019s research adviser for the study.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main source of uncertainty in these calculations was the initial water content of the subducting uppermost mantle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under the sea<\/h2>\n

To conduct the study, researchers listened to more than one year\u2019s worth of Earth\u2019s rumblings\u2014from ambient noise to actual earthquakes\u2014using a network of 19 passive, ocean-bottom seismographs deployed across the Mariana Trench, along with seven island-based seismographs.<\/p>\n

The trench is where the western Pacific Ocean plate slides beneath the Mariana plate and sinks deep into the Earth\u2019s mantle as the plates slowly converge.<\/p>\n

The new seismic observations paint a more nuanced picture of the Pacific plate bending into the trench\u2014resolving its three-dimensional structure and tracking the relative speeds of types of rock that have different capabilities for holding water.<\/p>\n

Rock can grab and hold onto water in a variety of ways. Ocean water atop the plate runs down into the Earth\u2019s crust and upper mantle along the fault lines that lace the area where plates collide and bend. Then it gets trapped.<\/p>\n

Under certain temperature and pressure conditions, chemical reactions force the water into a non-liquid form as hydrous minerals\u2014wet rocks\u2014locking the water into the rock in the geologic plate.<\/p>\n

All the while, the plate continues to crawl ever deeper into the Earth\u2019s mantle, bringing the water along with it.<\/p>\n

Previous studies at subduction zones like the Mariana Trench have noted that the subducting plate could hold water. But they could not determine how much water it held and how deep it went.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrevious conventions were based on active source studies, which can only show the top 3-4 miles into the incoming plate,\u201d Cai says, referring to a type of seismic study that uses sound waves created with the blast of an air gun from aboard an ocean research vessel to create an image of the subsurface rock structure.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey could not be very precise about how thick it is, or how hydrated it is,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur study tried to constrain that. If water can penetrate deeper into the plate, it can stay there and be brought down to deeper depths.\u201d<\/p>\n

The seismic images show that the area of hydrated rock at the Mariana Trench extends almost 20 miles beneath the seafloor\u2014much deeper than previously thought. The amount of water that can be held in this block of hydrated rock is considerable.<\/p>\n

What goes down must come up<\/h2>\n

For the Mariana Trench region alone, four times more water subducts than previously calculated. Researchers can also extrapolate these features to predict the conditions under other ocean trenches worldwide.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf other old, cold subducting slabs contain similarly thick layers of hydrous mantle, then estimates of the global water flux into the mantle at depths greater than 60 miles must be increased by a factor of about three,\u201d Wiens says.<\/p>\n

And for water in the Earth, what goes down must come up. Sea levels have remained relatively stable over geologic time, varying by less than 1,000 feet.<\/p>\n

This means that all of the water that is going down into the Earth at subduction zones must be coming back up somehow, and not continuously piling up inside the Earth.<\/p>\n

Scientists believe that most of the water that goes down at the trench comes back from the Earth into the atmosphere as water vapor when volcanoes erupt hundreds of miles away.<\/p>\n

But with the revised estimates of water from the new study, the amount of water going into the earth seems to greatly exceed the amount of water coming out.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe estimates of water coming back out through the volcanic arc are probably very uncertain,\u201d says Wiens, who hopes that this study will encourage other researchers to reconsider their models for how water moves back out of the Earth.<\/p>\n

Source: https:\/\/wattsupwiththat.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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