This story has been knocking around since June 12. That’s when NewScientist published an article claiming that scientists have discover a huge reservoir of water — what they call an ocean — deep beneath the Earth’s surface.
The article says that this underground ocean is hidden inside a blue rock called ringwoodite. It is supposedly 700 kilometers (that’s about 471 miles) deep inside the Earth.
It’s all very interesting; makes me think of Jules Verne and the underground ocean in Journey to the Center of the Earth. It also, oddly enough, fits rather handily with Scriptural descriptions of what happened with The Flood.
… on that day all the fountains of the deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
From NewScientist:
A reservoir of water three times the volume of all the oceans has been discovered deep beneath the Earth’s surface. The finding could help explain where Earth’s seas came from.
The water is hidden inside a blue rock called ringwoodite that lies 700 kilometres underground in the mantle, the layer of hot rock between Earth’s surface and its core.
The huge size of the reservoir throws new light on the origin of Earth’s water. 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.
“It’s good evidence the Earth’s water came from within,” says Steven Jacobsen of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The hidden water could also act as a buffer for the oceans on the surface, explaining why they have stayed the same size for millions of years.
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