According to global research, scientists have found a reservoir of water three times the size of all the seas beneath the Earth’s surface. The water has been discovered in the region where the upper and lower mantles of the Earth meet. According to ANI, the study team used Raman spectroscopy and FTIR spectrometry to examine a single diamond that developed 660 meters below the Earth’s surface.
The investigation supported a long-held notion: ocean water travels with subducting slabs and enters the transition zone. This implies that the interior of the Earth is a part of our planet’s water cycle.
Prof. Frank Brenker from the Institute for Geosciences at Goethe University in Frankfurt notes that “these mineral changes considerably restrict the motions of rock in the mantle.” For instance, mantle plumes and ascending columns of heated rock from the deep mantle may come to a standstill just below the transition zone. Mass that is moving in the opposite direction likewise stops moving.
Brenker asserts: “It is frequently difficult for subducting plates to penetrate the whole transition zone. As a result, this region under Europe has a vast cemetery of these plates.”
However, up until this point, it was unclear what long-term consequences the “sucking” of material into the transition zone would have on its geochemical make-up and if there would be more water present.
According to Brenker, subducting slabs “also piggyback deep-sea sediments into the Earth’s core. Large amounts of CO2 and water can be stored in these sediments. However, until recently, it was unknown how much water reaches the transition zone in the form of more stable, hydrous minerals and carbonates, making it difficult to determine if significant amounts of water are stored there.
The current circumstances would undoubtedly support such. Wadsleyite and ringwoodite, which are dense minerals, can retain much water, unlike olivine at lower depths. They can store so much water that the transition zone might theoretically hold six times as much water as our oceans. Therefore, we were aware of the border layer’s vast storage water,” Brenker says. “However, we didn’t know whether it did so.
The solution has now been revealed by a global investigation in which the Frankfurt geoscientist participated. The study team examined an African diamond from Botswana. It was created at 660 kilometers, just where the transition zone and lower mantle meet. At this location, ringwoodite predominates as a mineral. Even among the scarce diamonds of super-deep origin, which make up about 1% of all diamonds, those from this location are highly uncommon. The studies showed that the stone had a lot of ringwoodite inclusions, which have a lot of water in them. The study team was also able to establish the stone’s chemical make-up. It was nearly identical to virtually every piece of mantle rock discovered in basalts anywhere in the world.
The solution has now been revealed by a global investigation in which the Frankfurt geoscientist participated. The investigational team examined a diamond from This demonstrated that the diamond unquestionably originated from a typical component of the Earth’s mantle. According to Brenker, “this study has shown that the transition zone is not a dry sponge, but contains substantial amounts of water,” and “this also gets us one step closer to Jules Verne’s notion of an ocean inside the Earth.” The distinction is that instead of an ocean, Brenker said that there is hydrous rock, which neither feels wet nor drips water.
