Posted on 04/12/2006 10:01:52 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology have calculated that about 1.12 billion tonnes of water leaks into the Earth each year. Although a lot of water also moves in the other direction, not enough comes to the surface to balance what is lost. Eventually, lead researcher Shigenori Maruyama and his colleagues believe, all of it will disappear... His figures, which he describes as conservative, suggest the leakage has caused sea levels to drop by around 600 metres in the last 750 million years. This trend has been largely obscured in the geological record by shorter-term variations in sea levels.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
So should we line the ocean bottoms with plastic? ;)
Now this is what you get when college students try to figure out what happens to all that used beer.
Will this affect beer production?
We're all gonna die (in 5 billion years)!
No, but we should wrap this dude's head with tinfoil.
Geological history is full of ocean level rises and falls, and I doubt that has anything to do with water sinking down into the Earth - our planet tends to sort things out by density, given a few million years here and there to do such.
Remains of an ancient oceanUntil 65 million years ago, a great ocean, the Tethys, separated India from Asia. There were no Himalayas and no Tibetan Plateau... A team led by Rob Van der Voo of the Department of Geological Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan has found signs of this ancient ocean deep beneath the Indian subcontinent... By reconstructing the paths taken by earthquake waves through the Earth, they have created a three-dimensional computer model of the interior of the Earth beneath India and the surrounding area.
by Paul Cooper
26 August 1999Earth's Interior May Contain Oceans Of Water, Geologist SaysAs a rule, rocks on earth are quite dry -- much drier than meteorites, for example, which also contain wadsleyite. Earth rocks generally contain only a small fraction of 1 percent of water. Wadsleyite is about 3.3 percent water. That may not seem like much, but given the amount of wadsleyite scientists think is in the earth-- it could be three to five times the amount of all the surface water on the planet, Smyth said. "It's possible the earth has this way of regulating the amount of water on the surface," Smyth said... The earth's oceans have existed for at least four billion years, and have been fairly constant in volume over the last 500 million years. These "inner oceans" may play a role in regulating that supply, Smyth said. In 1996 Smyth also discovered wadsleyite II, which may store water under even greater pressures at a lower portion of the transition zone.
ScienceDaily
December 17, 1997Earth could hold more waterThere is already thought to be several oceans' worth of water slightly higher in the mantle, at a depth of around 400-650 km. This region is called the transition zone, as it is between the upper and the lower mantle. The lower mantle's minerals can retain about a tenth as much water as the rocks above, Murakami's team finds. But because the volume of the lower mantle is much greater than that of the transition zone, it could hold a comparable amount of water... Any hydrogen in the rocks presumably comes from trapped water, an idea that other measurements support. The researchers found more hydrogen than previous experiments had led them to expect.
by Philip Ball
8 March 2002Inner Earth May Hold More Water Than the SeasBased on what they witnessed in their lab, the researchers concluded that more water probably exists deep within the Earth than is present on Earth's surface -- as much as five times more... Murakami and his colleagues reached their conclusion based on how much water they managed to dissolve under the experiment's extreme conditions in several types of material that make up much of the lower mantle. They used heat and pressure -- 25.5 gigapascals of it, or more than 250,000 times natural atmospheric pressure at sea level -- to create four mineral compounds that exist in the lower mantle... Earth's oceans make up just 0.02 percent of the planet's total mass. T his means the vast lower mantle could contain many times more water than floats on the planet's surface.
by Ben Harder
March 7, 2002
Well, now I'm thirsty...
Small Comets and Our Origins
University of Iowa | circa 1999 | Louis A. Frank
Posted on 10/20/2004 2:13:25 AM EDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1250694/posts
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We're all gonna die (in 5 billion years)! -- ahayesThis article is from 1999, so make that 4 billion, 999 million, 999 thousand, 993 years.
Just grab the next passing snowball comet...
Well, isn't that expected since the earth is hollow as Admiral Byrd said?
Bush's Fault?
Sounds like a good way to offset the "rising" ocean levels due to global warming. /takes moonbat ears off.
When The Earth Dried OutAbout a billion years ago, the continents emerged relatively suddenly from an ocean that covered 95 percent of the Earth's surface, according to a new theory by Eldridge Moores, a geologist at the University of California, Davis. The appearance of large masses of dry land would have caused more extreme weather, changes in ocean currents and the emergence of proper seasons. In turn, these environmental changes may have led to rise in atmospheric oxygen that enabled the explosion of new life forms around 500 million years ago... In the early Earth, the ocean crust and the continental crust were much closer together in thickness, Moores said. That means that the difference between the height of the ocean floor and the height of the continents was much less. The oceans would have been much shallower, and the water would therefore have spread much further across the continents -- covering 90 to 95 percent of the planet's surface, instead of the present 70 percent. Many geologists agree with this scenario, Moores said. What is controversial is how quickly the Earth changed from a planet covered in water with a few mountainous islands to one with large continental landmasses. According to Moores' theory, the continents emerged quite suddenly, over about 200 million years... also implies that over time, the way plate tectonics works has changed.
Science Daily
February 11, 2002
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