Has anyone clicked on the photo above yet to read: 'Huge Ocean of Water Discovered Deep Below Earth's Surface'? The implications fascinate me. It almost seems that the hollow earth theorists are right after all. Despite the fact that my user name is Arne Saknussemm (The fictional, medieval discover and first voyager to Jules Verne's 'Center of the Earth') I have never given much credence to the hollow earth idea. Perhaps it is time for a rethink. I have no idea of course, but could it be that there is life down below in the Inner Sea? How is it related to the life at the deep oceanic vents? Could those organisms have migrated below over time? Could they have arisen from them, and be the oldest surface life there is? If there were life 'down below' I don't know what which would be more astonishing: that it has DNA similar to surface life, or that it is utterly different (okay, the second, I guess!). What if there are even invertebrate or vertebrate species down there? How have they evolved? I mean, what have they evolved into? Could there be intelligent life below? Naturally enough Jules Verne and other hollow-earthers have imagined terrestrial lands and life forms inside the Earth. Now it looks like it might be aquatic life. Hardly a surprise on a planet that would be more aptly named Ocean than Earth - especially now that we know there is much more water than we had previously known. If there were life way down there, what are the implications as to life on Europa or Mars or much further afield? The article also interestingly points out that the newly discovered ocean is a bonus for those who theorize that water is native to the Earth rather than having been brought here by comets. Then there is the possibility of (no pun intended, it's just the right word) 'tapping' this water. I have been hearing that while our present wars are about oil, in the near future (as they were also sometimes in the past,even the recent past (i.e. The Iran-Iraq War) future wars will be more about water rights. Now we are told that this inner sea has more than three times the volume than all of the surface oceans. I don't know if it is saltwater, or heavily mineralized -maybe no one knows yet- but we know how to desalinate and demineralize water already. I really think this could be the start of something big!
"The water is hidden inside a blue rock called ringwoodite..." Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The water is included in the mineral structure. So, no ocean. Even endolith life seems extremely unlikely at 700km depth and huge pressures and temperatures.
"Incredibly if just 1% of the Earth's mantle rock contained H2O that would amount to three times the amount of water that's in our oceans." They are speculating from a small sample & do not yet know how much is there.
All right the water is included in the ringwoodite. I could have read more carefully, but if you look at the photo caption and first paragraph of the linked article, such is not at all clear. The way they put it, one s free to imagine a sphere of water encased 700 kms down. And yes, when you consider that the deepest surface ocean depths are what, 7 kms, it's quite a stretch. However, this clarification in no way spoils my other supposition about tapping this water for human requirements. I realize we are currently incapable of drilling 700 kms into the lithosphere, but if we can dream of traveling at light speed to other stars, we can imagine digging very deep holes in our home planet. It's nice to know that the water is there. And how about this: what effect does all that water have on dampening the earth's spin? I mean, we're comfortable with our rotation rate as it is. Do we have the inner sea to thank for that? I know that even deeper parts of our sphere are molten as well, but what effect (if any) does being mostly liquid have on our rotation? And if some day in the far future the creamy milk-chocolate tootsie-roll center of the earth solidifies Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!p) and/or something happens to the inner ocean, how would that effect our spin? Here is a link to second article on the interior ocean. It's much like the first, but differs in its details somewhat.
A separate question I have, if any one knows, is about the water from comets theory as opposed to the native origin of water on Earth. First, even given the time frame of billions of years, Earth has an awful lot of water, and it's hard to imagine that so many ice-ball comets collided with the Earth. And how big are even the most massive comets anyway? I appreciate that lighter elements (say, water as opposed to granite or gold) were cast farther from the Sun when the solar system was formed, and that perhaps water would not 'originally' be found on Earth, but exactly how was water formed anywhere in earlier times? Why should it form at all? What prompted hydrogen and oxygen to combine in this way? Wouldn't even greater quantities of those elements just dissipated in gaseous form?
Yeah, from what little I remember from a geology class that I took decades ago, the pressures and temperatures even 700 km down should be substantial. Rock starts to become less solid and more plastic. Various petrogenic (rock forming) processes occur. It probably wouldn't be a suitable environment for life, even thermophilic bacteria. But I do remember reading that bacteria have been found inside the earth at surprising depths of maybe two kilometers. (They don't seem to know how deep the lower limit is.) The bacteria seem to live in voids and even between the grains of poorly consolidated sedimentary rock. I think that's fascinating. Are there unique species of bacteria down there? Have they been down there, and perhaps evolutionarily isolated from events on the surface, for long periods of time?
They're big enough, and formerly much, much more numerous. It's not just the ocean, after all - the entire planet is an accumulation of debris formerly in orbit around a new sun. One of the aids to imagination of cometary ocean formation might be a visit to some place that has a 1/million scale model of the earth - about 10 meters in diameter, by no coincidence - and noticing how deep the ocean would be on that ten meter ball of accumulated asteroidal and cometary and other orbital debris. Note: the appropriate unit for measuring the ocean's depths is the meter, on the full size version - it would be the micrometer, on the scale model.
To, perhaps, help put this in perspective: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
No, no reason to rethink "hollow Earth." You ever notice planets, and other large astronomical bodies, are round? Gravity causes this to happen. One of the conditions, established in 2006, for a body to be in consideration for a planet is to have enough gravity to pull themselves into a sphere. You put enough mass together and it automatically pulls itself into a sphere. How do you get a hollow body under these conditions? Add to it: inside a hollow sphere the gravity is 0. Gravitation Inside A Uniform Hollow Sphere
None. The Earth's spin is a consequence of the net angular momentum of all the bodies which accreted to form the planet, coupled with subsequent gravitational interaction and transfer of momentum, primarily with the moon, but with sun and other bodies also. Plus, as has already been pointed out, there isn't really any water anyway. It's like saying there a huge reservoir of oxygen down there that is many orders of magnitude greater than the oxygen in the atmosphere. Totally misleading. Science journalism at its worst. No. There is no inner sea. The planet is not mostly molten, or liquid. It is mostly solid. The small outer core (<15% of planetary volume) is molten. The inner core and the mantle are solid, though some pockets of partial melting occur in the upper mantle. The crust can be ignored for all practical purposes. It would impact on the tidal effects between Earth and Moon and Earth and Sun. This would, I think, slow down the already slow transfer of angular momentum to the moon, but not by much.
Hey trippy, really a great post. Those 2 pictures really helped put things in perspective. It is funny how you can read something but when it is presented in a unique way it really sort of clicks for you.
