Is there an ocean in Earth's core?
According to an international study, scientists have found a three times larger reservoir than all the oceans on Earth's core. A zone of water exists between the upper and lower mantles of the Earth.
Hidden inside the Earth—within the first several hundred kilometers below the crust—there is another ocean. It is, most likely, the largest ocean in the world. This water is not sloshing around in a big pool.
Scientists have long speculated that water is trapped in a rocky layer of the Earth's mantle located between the lower mantle and upper mantle, at depths between 250 miles and 410 miles.
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Far from the Sun, where temperatures are low, water formed icy objects such as comets, while closer to the Sun water reacted with rocky materials to form hydrated minerals. It's thought that the mostly likely way that planet Earth inherited its water was from asteroids and comets crashing into it.
“The intense pressures in the deep ocean make it an extremely difficult environment to explore.” Although you don't notice it, the pressure of the air pushing down on your body at sea level is about 15 pounds per square inch. If you went up into space, above the Earth's atmosphere, the pressure would decrease to zero.
Interestingly this isn't a reservoir in the conventional sense; there isn't a vast floating ocean underneath America. And no, there are no dinosaurs wandering its shores. Instead the water is trapped inside the molecular structure of minerals found within the mantle rock.
While thousands of climbers have successfully scaled Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth, only two people have descended to the planet's deepest point, the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench.
The ocean floor is called the abyssal plain. Below the ocean floor, there are a few small deeper areas called ocean trenches. Features rising up from the ocean floor include seamounts, volcanic islands and the mid-oceanic ridges and rises.
As much as half of all the water on Earth may have come from that interstellar gas according to astrophysicists' calculations. That means the same liquid we drink and that fills the oceans may be millions of years older than the solar system itself.
When was the Earth filled with water?
According to a new, Harvard-led study, geochemical calculations about the interior of the planet's water storage capacity suggests Earth's primordial ocean 3 to 4 billion years ago may have been one to two times larger than it is today, and possibly covered the planet's entire surface.
Jacques Piccard, right, co-designer of the Trieste, and Ernest Virgil load iron shot ballast into the sub prior to a test descent into the Marianas Trench, Nov. 15, 1959. On Jan. 23, 1960, Walsh and Piccard made history when they made the five-hour, 6.78-mile odyssey to the world's deepest-known point.
In fact, 65% of our planet remains unexplored, most of which lies beneath the oceans. Literally anything could be down there, and we wouldn't know.
More than eighty percent of our ocean is unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored. Much remains to be learned from exploring the mysteries of the deep.
Their conclusion is that most of the water we drink formed during the early formation of the Solar System some 4.5 billion years ago. In other words, it is older than Earth itself.
Water flows endlessly between the ocean, atmosphere, and land. Earth's water is finite, meaning that the amount of water in, on, and above our planet does not increase or decrease.
Scientists say it's highly unlikely. While large-scale collisions were prevalent when our solar system was young, it would be extremely rare for one to occur in a stable and established system like our own.
That led to the conclusion that the temperature of the center of the Earth is about 6000 degrees Celsius - a temperature about 9% higher than what exists on the surface of the Sun.
The primary contributors to heat in the core are the decay of radioactive elements, leftover heat from planetary formation, and heat released as the liquid outer core solidifies near its boundary with the inner core.
Scientists have determined the temperature near the Earth's centre to be 6000 degrees Celsius, 1000 degrees hotter than in a previous experiment run 20 years ago.
Is there anything inside the Earth's core?
The deepest layer is a solid iron ball, about 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) in diameter. Although this inner core is white hot, the pressure is so high the iron cannot melt. The iron isn't pure—scientists believe it contains sulfur and nickel, plus smaller amounts of other elements.
It is at least 10.984 km deep from the sea level.
Unlike the mineral-rich crust and mantle, the core is made almost entirely of metal—specifically, iron and nickel. The shorthand used for the core's iron-nickel alloys is simply the elements' chemical symbols—NiFe. Elements that dissolve in iron, called siderophiles, are also found in the core.
Study of diamonds finds weird form of “ice” Small pockets of water exist deep beneath Earth's surface, according to an analysis of diamonds belched from hundreds of kilometers within our planet.
Earth's solid inner core may be home to a "hidden new world", scientists have claimed. Within the scientific community, there is consensus about Earth's inner core being a solid compressed ball of iron alloy, which is surrounded by the Earth's outer core.