Jan 2, 2018 06:42 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 2, 2018 06:44 PM by Magical Realist.)
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/artic...e=vicefbus
"In what sounds like a chapter from Journey to the Centre of the Earth, the chemical makeup of a tiny, extremely rare gemstone has made researchers think that there are oceans that exist hundreds of miles beneath the Earth.
The gemstone in question is called ringwoodite, which is created when olivine, a material that is extremely common in the mantle, is highly pressurized; when it's exposed to less pressurized environments, it reverts into olivine. It has previously been seen in meteorites and created in a laboratory, but until now had never been found in a sample of the Earth's mantle.
Diamond expert Graham Pearson of the University of Alberta came across a seemingly worthless, 3 millimeter piece of brown diamond that had been found in Mato Grosso, Brazil while he was researching another type of mineral. Within that diamond, he and his team found ringwoodite—and they found that roughly 1.5 percent of the ringwoodite's weight was made up of trapped water. The findings are published in Nature.
That water had to get in there somehow, and, using analyses of its depth and its water makeup, Pearson suggests that there's water deep beneath the Earth's surface—a lot of it.
The finding "confirms predictions from high-pressure laboratory experiments that a water reservoir comparable in size to all the oceans combined is hidden deep in Earth's mantle," according to an analysis of Pearson's findings by Hans Keppler of the University of Bayreuth in Germany."
"In what sounds like a chapter from Journey to the Centre of the Earth, the chemical makeup of a tiny, extremely rare gemstone has made researchers think that there are oceans that exist hundreds of miles beneath the Earth.
The gemstone in question is called ringwoodite, which is created when olivine, a material that is extremely common in the mantle, is highly pressurized; when it's exposed to less pressurized environments, it reverts into olivine. It has previously been seen in meteorites and created in a laboratory, but until now had never been found in a sample of the Earth's mantle.
Diamond expert Graham Pearson of the University of Alberta came across a seemingly worthless, 3 millimeter piece of brown diamond that had been found in Mato Grosso, Brazil while he was researching another type of mineral. Within that diamond, he and his team found ringwoodite—and they found that roughly 1.5 percent of the ringwoodite's weight was made up of trapped water. The findings are published in Nature.
That water had to get in there somehow, and, using analyses of its depth and its water makeup, Pearson suggests that there's water deep beneath the Earth's surface—a lot of it.
The finding "confirms predictions from high-pressure laboratory experiments that a water reservoir comparable in size to all the oceans combined is hidden deep in Earth's mantle," according to an analysis of Pearson's findings by Hans Keppler of the University of Bayreuth in Germany."
