Earth May Have Massive Subterranean Water Reservoir,
Bigger Than All Our Oceans
"A battered diamond ..... confirms a long-held theory: Earth's mantle holds an ocean's worth of water."It's actually the confirmation that there is a very, very large amount of water that's trapped in a really distinct layer in the deep Earth," said Graham Pearson, lead study author and a geochemist at the University of Alberta in Canada.
The diamond from Brazil .... Olivine is ringwoodite at this depth, a layer called the mantle transition zone. And it resolves a long-running debate about water in the mantle transition zone. The ringwoodite is 1.5 percent water, present not as a liquid but as hydroxide ions (oxygen and hydrogen molecules bound together). The results suggest there could be a vast store of water in the mantle transition zone, which stretches from 254 to 410 miles deep.
Plate tectonics recycles Earth's crust by pushing and pulling slabs of oceanic crust into subduction zones, where it sinks into the mantle. This crust, soaked by the ocean, ferries water into the mantle. Many of these slabs end up stuck in the mantle transition zone. "We think that a significant portion of the water in the mantle transition zone is from the emplacement of these slabs," Pearson said. "The transition zone seems to be a graveyard of subducted slabs."
Keppler noted that it's possible the volcanic eruption that brought the deep diamond to Earth's surface may have sampled an unusually water-rich part of the mantle....A violent volcanic eruption called a kimberlite quickly carried this particular diamond from deep in the mantle." ScientificAmerican
In the six hundredth year of Noah's life,
in the second month,
the seventeenth day of the month,
the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up,
and the windows of heaven were opened.
Genesis 7:11
