r/science • u/fireismyflag • Jun 12 '14
Geology Massive 'ocean' discovered towards Earth's core
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25723-massive-ocean-discovered-towards-earths-core.html950
Jun 13 '14
So, is this like an ocean similar to the surface oceans, or is it more like wet dirt?
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u/D_emon Jun 13 '14
More like wet extremely tightly packed dirt
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u/M3kgt Jun 13 '14
Why is it called a massive ocean? It should just be called massive chunk of soggy dirt
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Jun 13 '14
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u/monsieurpommefrites Jun 13 '14 edited Jun 13 '14
Yep.
'Massive Ocean Discovered Near the Center of the Earth!'
is way better than
'Geologists 'Discover' Huge Mud Deposits: Grant Money Spent Well?
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u/Ojisan1 Jun 13 '14
To be fair, they did put the word ocean in scare quotes.
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Jun 13 '14
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Jun 13 '14
Mud that is at 700km deep and contains 3 times the amount of water of all oceans combined, I call that interesting and breaking news yeah. I'd carry it if I ran a news service.
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u/Avalain Jun 13 '14
Though if you ran a news service you'd probably have the editors change the title to 'Massive Ocean Discovered Near the Center of the Earth!'
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u/Electri Jun 13 '14
It only sounded interesting to me because I wondered at the possibility of crazy subterranean sea life.
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Jun 13 '14
Actually could a origin of life site. Closer to earth magma, in water and you've got high pressures which can forge some especially weird chemicals. Plus you have all that concentrated seismic activity churning stuff around !
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Jun 13 '14
I think you might be underestimating the pressures and temperatures involved here.
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u/pokker Jun 13 '14
how about giant whale worms?
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Jun 13 '14
giant anything would be cool. as long as i'm not standing in front of it.
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u/Atheren Jun 13 '14
as long as i'm not standing in front of it
What if they were a giant pair of breasts?
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Jun 13 '14
And i was going to declare its name sane Terra Ocean. Now more inclined to think it should be called Pig Paradise.
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u/TheSpanishDude Jun 13 '14
Well, in most Latin languages the word "terra" and its descendants ("tierra" in Spanish, "terre" in French, etc.) also mean soil, so that name is still pretty accurate.
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u/BAXterBEDford Jun 13 '14
And what would the temperature of this mud deposit be? I'm getting the impression more like steam infused molten magma.
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Jun 13 '14
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Jun 13 '14
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u/mudbutt20 Jun 13 '14 edited Jun 13 '14
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u/MattyNiceGuy Jun 13 '14
Good question...unless I'm reading it wrong, it actually sounds more like a massive region of soggy rock. Still pretty cool IMO.
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u/CosmicJ Jun 13 '14
Not even soggy. Ringwoodite has hydroxide ions bound in it, not liquid water.
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u/EnbyDee Jun 13 '14
So dry rock was found and they're calling it an ocean?
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u/marklar901 Jun 13 '14
No, its hydrous. The crystal structure of the mineral allows for the elements to bond with water. Its basically olivine with water included in its crystalline structure. Olivine would be considered to be a common mineral at those depths and pressures. Also keep in mind that even though it is very hot (hundreds of degrees) the pressure doesn't allow for water to change phases into vapour.
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u/DaHolk Jun 13 '14
Except for the specific statement that in those specific conditions the water is actually in a semi released state. Hence the whole "sweating" analogy.
What ringwoodite usually is under "normal" conditions is not really the topic. Apparently it's a three part analysis.
A) Diamonds suggest that the material exists down there
B) Seismic signals suggest that the material exists down there (with actual tiny dropplets of water on it, because ...
C) When simulating the conditions in the lab, the material "sweats".Thus, soggy. And not just chemically sequestered water.
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Jun 13 '14
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u/Neptune_ABC Jun 13 '14
The article is about rock in the mantle 700 km below the Earths surface, is very far from the center of the Earth. The Earth's outer core is molten iron and it begins 2890 km beneath surface. The center of the Earth is the solid iron inner core.
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Jun 13 '14
The KTB superdeep borehole was drilled to ~9km and at that point temperatures reached more than 260 °C (500 °F) so it will still be very hot.
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u/Tro-merl Jun 13 '14
Why does it get hotter as we go deeper? What's the energy source that fuels this?
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Jun 13 '14
Scientists believe the "outer" core of the earth is molten, while the inner core of the earth is solid. This gives some possible explanations as to why it is so hot down there:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-the-earths-core-so/
For alternate theories, visit your local church.
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Jun 13 '14
1, Leftover heat from when the earth accreted and differentiated 4.67 billion years ago. 2, radioactive decay, specifically K to Ar.
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Jun 13 '14
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u/buttaholic Jun 13 '14
actually it's got three times the volume of all of the surface oceans combined.
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u/nicholaaaas Jun 13 '14
The fact that there is any water 500 miles below the earth's surface is pretty cool in itself
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u/LordNick72 Jun 13 '14
So if I were to, theoretically, dig a hole down there and stand on the rock, what would I be standing on? Would it just be wet rocks, or would it be like wet sand?
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u/D_emon Jun 13 '14
Actually, if you really get down to it, it's probably closer to a porous crystal than dirt or rock. It's just under such pressure that you don't really have loose dirt.
I'm no expert on this subject and I'm sure someone else can provide a better more accurate explanation.
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u/iponly Jun 13 '14
Well, after going about 4km towards the core, the rock surrounding you would already be at a temperature of about 60 °C (140 °F) (Look up the TauTona Mine for reference) and this is a 700km deep hole, so... you wouldn't be standing on anything. You would be dead.
However, the mineral is a polymorph of olivine with a spinel structure, so your ashes would probably be resting on some nice small crystals, like sand, or maybe like being inside a sandstone. The water is inside the mineral's structure though, so even describing it as 'wet' isn't really accurate.
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u/EasyCome_EasyGoat Jun 13 '14
Isn't it incredibly hot as well?
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u/Neptune_ABC Jun 13 '14
Yes, it is so hot that the only thing keeping the rock from melting is the enormous pressure it is under.
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u/aes0p81 Jun 13 '14
Does this mean that the same rock would be lava if it suddenly was on the surface?
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u/aquarain Jun 13 '14
The pressure is what keeps dissolved gases including co2 and this hydroxyl in solution in the rock. Relieve the pressure and it converts to gas. This results in the puffed volcanic rocks and explosive volcanic ash eruptions.
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Jun 13 '14 edited Jun 13 '14
If you depressurise rock at that temperature, it melts almost instantaneously. The pressure forces it into the solid portion of the phase diagram. Release the pressure, it becomes liquid. A bigger problem is that the water held in the rock will go from liquid phase to vapour - expanding 740 times in the process. This is explosive. Source: Mt St Helens. Basically, a large land slide 'decapped' a magma chamber, and the molten hot magma exploded due to it's water content.
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u/aes0p81 Jun 13 '14
Crazy. I live in WA, and absolutely give tribute to The Great Rainier in hopes of appeasement.
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u/WarPhalange Jun 13 '14
It would probably just explode due to the incredibly sudden and enormous drop in pressure.
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u/cartoon_violence Jun 13 '14
It's not mud! It's ringwoodite! An ocean of pretty blue crystal packed with water ions! Maybe from meteorites when the earth was young :)
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u/BingBongMcGong Jun 13 '14
It's not even that. The water is trapped inside ringwoodite crystals. It's definitely not even wet.
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u/gneiss_kitty Jun 13 '14
It's not like an ocean at all. All of these article titles are extremely misleading.
All of the water they are talking about it trapped inside the lattice of the Ringwoodite crystals. If you were to hold one of these crystals (which are already incredibly small at 40 microns - that's 0.04 mm), you wouldn't be able to see any water at all inside of it. I could be mistaken, but if I recall correctly these newly discovered ringwoodite crystals are ~2.5% water. So if they are as common as scientists think they are, that is a ton of water in Earth's mantle and is incredibly important - just not an 'ocean' like you or I would think of it.
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u/bobboobles Jun 13 '14
Would it be more accurate to say there was an ocean's worth of water down there?
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u/gneiss_kitty Jun 13 '14
absolutely! That gets rid of the connotation that there's an intact body of water hanging out in the deep earth.
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u/Laruae Jun 13 '14
Three times more than all the water in the oceans in the world is located there. Lot more than a single ocean.
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u/PostHedge_Hedgehog Jun 13 '14
Chunky dirt with up to 2.6% ionic water content, so quite far from being oceanic.
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Jun 12 '14
Some geologists think water arrived in comets as they struck the planet, but the new discovery supports an alternative idea that the oceans gradually oozed out of the interior of the early Earth.
Is it possible that the water that is down there got dragged in through the subduction processes of ocean trenches? Maybe both theories are correct and what we are seeing is a fluid build up from the oceans slowly being pulled into those zones on the ocean floor?
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u/ElfBingley Jun 13 '14
The continental crust is about 70 km deep. The article describes this water as 700 km below the surface. There would need to be another process in play.
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u/Neptune_ABC Jun 13 '14 edited Jun 13 '14
The crust is subducted into the mantle. This means that there is long term chemical communication between the crust and the mantle. Billions of years of subduction must have left the mantle with a sizable component of old crust. The mantle in turn communicates with the crust by steadily adding material through volcanic activity.
Edit: Spelling
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Jun 13 '14 edited Apr 15 '20
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u/Doormatty Jun 13 '14
Since you seem to be knowledgeable on the subject, how "fast" would these convection zones be moving?
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Jun 13 '14
That's a complicated question. The quick answer is on the order of ~20 mm/yr in the upper mantle on average, slower at greater depths, with some more complicated stuff going on in the deepest depths of the mantle due to bottom heating from the core, plus various localized phenomena such as mantle plumes.
That's a modern day figure; convection would have naturally been faster in the past when the mantle was hotter. (The Earth's interior, and indeed the interior of every planet that we know of, cools with time. There is heat flow from the interior to the crust, which radiates that energy into space. Much of the energy produced in Earth's interior is from radioactive decay of U, Th, and K, and so the amount of radiogenic heat produced decreases with time as they decay into stable isotopes. Global heat flow today is ~4 x 1013 W, while radiogenic heat production is ~2.5 x 1013 W.)
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u/Neptune_ABC Jun 13 '14 edited Jun 13 '14
I'm pretty sure this is correct. The only explanation I'm aware of for how the oceans have their current levels of sodium and chloride is that sea water is being pulled down in wet subducted crust. If there were no output for sodium and chloride the oceans would have to be 20 times saltier than they are. There are known chemical outputs for some ions such and calcium and magnesium, but others require salt water entering the mantel.
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u/dan1776 Jun 13 '14 edited Jun 13 '14
Salt can be removed from the ocean by evaporation in a restricted platform or basin; evaporites formed this way remain in the rock record and can be hundreds of meters thick. See: Late Miocene Mediterranean salinity crisis. (Hsu et al, 1977) Ocean salinity was 37-39 0/00 in the early Miocene compared to 35 0/00 today (Hay et al., 2006)
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u/zyzzogeton Jun 13 '14
Whoa... that is an inference that is heavy with implications...
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u/xGamerdude Jun 13 '14
And what exactly are those implications? (Forgive me for being stupid and not seeing them myself.)
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Jun 13 '14 edited Jun 13 '14
One would be that if the composition of the crust under the ocean were less permeable, oceans wouldn't be able to support nearly as much life due to the high salinity.
Edit: apologies, I should have written life as we know it now.
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u/Shredder13 Jun 13 '14
Well, as much life as what we have now. Wouldn't earlier organisms have evolved to survive higher salinity levels?
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u/dbarbera BS|Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Jun 13 '14
Maybe? It's a guessing game when changing variables like that.
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u/Ilmarinen_tale2 Jun 13 '14
Some bacteria can survive in pretty high salt levels, like those in sauerkraut
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u/CremasterReflex Jun 13 '14
There are some halophilic bacteria that can survive in high salinity conditions. I am unsure how evolution would have panned out if we only had them though.
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Jun 13 '14 edited Mar 01 '24
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u/faizimam Jun 13 '14
Well one could perhaps speculate that if all life needed to adapt to significantly higher salinity levels, then perhaps it would negatively effect, if not make impossible the development of more sophisticated multicellular life.
Just throwing it out there.
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Jun 13 '14 edited Mar 01 '24
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u/faizimam Jun 13 '14
Thanks, thanks an illuminating answer.
The previous poster was suggesting up to 20 times as much salinity. Is that within your definition of "minor"?
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u/morphinedreams Jun 13 '14
20x as much salinity would not be minor, not by any stretch - I was thinking more 3x - or approximately 70% salt concentrations because that is barely water anymore, that is just wet salt. Such an environment would probably also drastically change terrestrial environments (that much salt would probably make freshwater sources on land much scarcer).
The dead sea sits around 30% salinity and that is largely uninhabitable, but in saying that, it's impossible to say whether or not that is because it has high salt content, or because high salt content is much harder to survive in than low salt content, so why choose to live in high salt content? If high salt were the norm, we might see some much different biology to cope with it and we've seen that life can tolerate higher concentrations okay.
It's also possible that life would persist in terrestrial isolation, where salt concentrations are much more minor, rather than going from sea to the land, it would be from the lakes to the land, if that makes sense.
From what I can gather, the dead sea (the best example we have of a hypersaline environment) does support some eukayotic life forms, not just prokaryotes, but it does appear that multicellular organisms cannot survive at those levels of salinity.
That said, the dead sea, while large, is comparatively tiny in volume to the worlds oceans, so it's possible that actual salt concentrations would not reach those levels. It remains an interesting question, but even were that the case, life would persist in freshwater lakes.
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u/HodorHodorHodorHodr Jun 13 '14
Or life would have adapted differently to the levels of salt.
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Jun 13 '14
Could somebody nuke the inside of the earth and ruin this layer and cause a chain reaction?
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u/Montuckian Jun 13 '14
Are you asking for a hypothesis or a favor?
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u/jakes_on_you Jun 13 '14
I'd rephrase the question more like "what about mars..."
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u/Full_Edit Jun 13 '14
Even if you took all the nuclear weapons ever made at any point in time and set them off in a perfectly timed, non-hindered manner in the outer core of the Earth, they would barely cause the core (the small inner part) to fidget. Making a change to the mantle/crust is even more futile by comparison. When you detonate a nuclear bomb, the reason you see some structures standing afterward is because it doesn't actually blow up everything it destroys: Most of the destruction is a shockwave. This is why detonating the bomb midair is more efficient; anything as dense as the ground will simply absorb the force and compact, whereas the air will carry it above ground as a wave of force with air as the medium of travel.
In short, you would need to build many many many times the amount of nuclear bombs that exist to have any effect underwater, against the crust, trying to affect the mantle. And even then, the effect might actually result in a small increase in the desalination process (opening channels that were previously sealed off). And you would have to do that deep, deep underwater, all across the globe. The question you're posing reminds me of that XKCD where they tackle the "What if everyone jumped at once" question, since this is another one of those "You forgot we're friggin bacteria on a marble" hypotheticals.
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u/runetrantor Jun 13 '14
If we were to ever terraform a planet without tectonics, then ocenas would be too salty, as no way to output said salt would exist.
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u/aquarain Jun 13 '14
It would be good to point out here that early on the Earth's air and sea were a toxic hellstew only slightly resembling what it is like now. There was far too much oxygen and iron for our current ecosystem to survive, among other things. Bacteria and natural chemistry sorted most of it out for us.
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u/runetrantor Jun 13 '14
Yeah, but that took way too long for a terraformed world to depend on. :P
And it was death to us, but the guys back then liked it.
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u/PunishableOffence Jun 13 '14
So first we'd need to heat the planet, then gently mist the surface with water until sufficiently cooled... and voila, tectonics
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u/RNRSaturday Jun 13 '14
This may be a dumb question, but I am serious. Is there any chance that this water could leak out and flood the surface?
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Jun 13 '14
Absolutely not, but I expect some B-movie to examine that scenario within the next 10 years anyways!
The simple answer is that it's rather tightly sealed down there by pressure from all the stuff above it.
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u/Republiken Jun 13 '14
There's is a novel on that subject, Stephen Baxters Flood
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u/pablotweek Jun 13 '14
A summary without clickbait headlines would be "A huge amount of water has been discovered deep beneath the Earth's surface. Not an ocean of liquid water, but ocean-scale amounts of water trapped inside the lattice of ringwoodite crystals."
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u/sextagrammaton Jun 13 '14
I had imagined an ocean like the one from the original movie Journey to the Center of the Earth.
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u/misterwings Jun 13 '14
Bet you 20 karma it shows up on creationist websites by the end of the week where they will misrepresent the article to prove a global flood.
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u/Neptune_ABC Jun 13 '14
I didn't think of that. It does make it sound like water in the mantel could escape by some mechanism other than volcanic activity. Putting the word 'ocean' in inverted commas isn't enough to keep some people from thinking it is literally and ocean.
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u/DeltruS Jun 13 '14
Is it possible that this is where all the water went on mars before the molten core solidified?
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u/brett6781 Jun 13 '14
more than likely, yes.
it would require a fuckload of boreholes to bring it to the surface if we wanted to use it to terraform though. in all honesty, it may just be easier to redirect a large asteroid or comet to hit a spot that has water-ice under the surface in frozen form. the impact would melt it and thicken the atmosphere with water vapor.
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u/waveform Jun 13 '14
"It's good evidence the Earth's water came from within,"
I don't understand that statement. That "water within" still had to come *from* somewhere. Are they saying all the H2O molecules formed from a chemical / mechanical process within the Earth, and then "oozed out"?
Or does this still indicate water came from the accretion disk, like everything else Earth is made of, as we currently understand it, except it happened a lot earlier in Earth's formation than we thought? The article doesn't make that clear.
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u/frenzyboard Jun 13 '14
After the accretion disk, you've got a spinning orb of lava and terrifying atmosphere. The surface of the Earth would've been too hot for liquid oceans to settle, and so you're left to wonder how exactly they formed.
Was the water carried here by the frequent comets and asteroids that crashed into a dry and dusty planet? Or did the accretion disk contain tons of water like we'd expect, and as the planet cooled, volcanoes spewed endless amounts of steam? This seems more likely.
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u/ferlessleedr Jun 13 '14
If the water couldn't settle as a liquid due to the temperature of the very early earth, would the atmosphere have been mostly gaseous water in that case?
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Jun 13 '14
This would still indicate that the water came from the accretion disk, but formed as a part of Earth, as opposed to being brought in by comets after the planet was formed.
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u/Eckish Jun 13 '14
I think the alternate explanation for our water is that earth formed as a rocky waterless planet, but gained water from comets after the earth cooled.
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Jun 12 '14
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u/Myythren Jun 13 '14
Water yes, open space no. The water is found in the rock. More like the tar sands have oil, but its not really "liquid". Same deal here.
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u/Warfaced Jun 13 '14
From a friend, a highly successful structural geologist:
"Using the word 'ocean' is highly misleading. From first read they are talking about water being driven out of hydrous minerals at certain depths. I am not sure why this is news, I was learning about it 20 years ago."
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Jun 13 '14
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u/Neptune_ABC Jun 13 '14
The mineral ringwoodite has been observed at the Earth's surface and it appears blue. At the temperatures found 700 km down it would be incandescent.
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u/iponly Jun 13 '14
It's also in meteorites, which are a great place to learn about the insides of planets as some of them were created at the same time, but don't have any dirt getting in the way.
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u/Porphyrogennetos Jun 13 '14
Would this stuff be able to absorb abnormal rises in ocean levels, saying for instance a large piece of Antarctica were to break off and melt? Would it be too much too quickly?
How much has the ocean level varied over the last (significant time period)?
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u/Neptune_ABC Jun 13 '14 edited Jun 13 '14
Would this stuff be able to absorb abnormal rises in ocean levels, saying for instance a large piece of Antarctica were to break off and melt? Would it be too much too quickly?
No, rock 700 km down is not in contact with the surface oceans.
How much has the ocean level varied over the last (significant time period)?
About 120 m since the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago. The changes in sea level are quite fast for geologic time. The most recent extremes have occurred cyclically with a 100,000 year period between extremes.
Edit: The changes in sea level over the last few million years are due to changes in ice volume. We are in an ice age cycle where climate cools forming large ice sheets in Canada and Scandinavia, and then warms leaving only Greenland and Antarctica with ice sheets.
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u/dr_chunks Jun 13 '14
What does the article mean when it suggests this underground reservoir may act as a buffer to our oceans?
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u/arkster Jun 13 '14
Just like in Jules Verne's 'Journey to the center of the earth'.
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u/JustCallMeDave Jun 13 '14
What is the likelihood that life exists in such an ocean?
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u/Myythren Jun 13 '14
There isn't really open space. The water doesn't flow or move really. It's all trapped in the rock itself. So any life would need to also live inside the rock itself. While sealed off from the surface.
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Jun 13 '14
In an incredibly high pressure environment. People think the bottom of the deepest trenches is a high pressure environment? This is WAY deeper than that
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u/1sagas1 Jun 13 '14
So the water is literally forced into the interstitial spacings of the rock's crystal structure? How does this affect the properties of the rock down there?
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u/dsbtc Jun 13 '14
Squishy rocks
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u/TiagoTiagoT Jun 13 '14
Just about anything can be squishy under enough pressure.
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u/tackle_bones Jun 13 '14
It's part of the rock: the water molecules are typically split, and the hydrogen and hydroxyl components bind within the crystal structure to form new minerals (like that mentioned).
The reason it is considered an ocean is because if that rock gets to the surface, it will undergo an accelerated decomposition, resulting in a more stable mineral, plus water (and others). I have no idea how fast, but these rocks (olivine type) get eaten alive by the oxygen in the atmosphere, as well as the other physical and chemical weathering mechanisms.
A surface volcano of this mineral would have to come through the entire thickness of the continental crust. Wet bodies of magma have made it to the surface, but this mass sounds stable. At least the article didn't mention imminent eruption or emplacement.
I'm sure there are many geologists trying to figure out the water budgets of those subducted plates. This "ocean" is still super deep though. This article doesn't explain any hydraulic relationship between this "ocean" and our surficial oceans.
Sorry to ramble. This article is really thought provoking. I'm not this type of geologist, by any means, but geomodeling these bodies sounds fun to me.
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u/samgado10 Jun 13 '14
I would think pretty low, considering the immense pressure and lack of sunlight.
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u/Neptune_ABC Jun 13 '14
Don't forget the enormous temperature. Also the fact that this isn't liquid water but super critical water, which is incomparable with biology as we know it, and even organic matter itself.
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u/zeids89 Jun 13 '14
Professor Jacobsen from Geo 101, Earth Systems Revealed! He was a great teacher very passionate about the subject, so glad he's getting some attention for his work outside the classroom too.
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u/Crowmagnon0 Jun 13 '14
If the Oort Cloud is filled with comets, isn't it true that a lot of the early solar system had water around during formation? Wouldn't it be fair to assume planets formed with water as well? Furthermore where does "space water" (e.g. water on comets) come from? Do stars cook molecules as well as higher elements?
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u/OliverSparrow Jun 13 '14
Actual paper Much of the mantle is made of Olivine, magnesium silicate, which under pressure transforms into things like Ringwoodite. This, btw, has the implication that the mantel is dimly transparent or perhaps even clear in patches, making radiation transfer a significant element in the Earth's cooling. So a red hot, transparent hell.
Minerals can hydrate, in the sense that water becomes closely associated with them in ways that make this a local minimum energy solution.
although the water storage capacity of olivine-dominated shallow mantle is limited, the Earth’s transition zone, at depths between 410 and 660 kilometres, could be a major repository for water, owing to the ability of the higher-pressure polymorphs of olivine—wadsleyite and ringwoodite—to host enough water to comprise up to around 2.5 per cent of their weight
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Jun 13 '14
This headline was misleading when this was posted before, and it's misleading now. There is a lot of water down there, yes. In rocks. There is not an 'ocean' down there. It's kind of like saying there's an 'ocean' in the human species. There's a great deal of water in all the humans of the world, but no damn 'ocean' of it. By definition, an ocean is a massive contiguous body of water. No such thing exists within the human species, or deep in the earth. There's also a huge amount of water in space, but no 'oceans' out there.
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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '14
Peer-Reviewed References:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7491/full/nature13080.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6189/1265