The seafloor
Credit: tomisl.z/Depositphotos
Three times more ocean water than originally thought is being swallowed by the Earth as the planet’s tectonic plates sink below one another, a new study discovered.
Published in the journal Nature, a team of researchers took an estimate of how much water is being sucked into the Earth’s interior through subduction zones — where two continental plates meet and one is being drawn downward.
Researchers used data recorded by seismographs along the Mariana Trench — a subduction zone where the Pacific Plate is subducted beneath the Philippine Plate — to analyze a year’s worth of measurements that enabled them to draw a better picture of just how much water the rocks inside the plates could hold. The determination was made by recording the speed at which seismic waves travel through the rocks.
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Near the Mariana Trench, at least 4.3 times more ocean water is subducted than previously thought.
This discovery bodes large in understanding the Earth’s deep water cycle, said Columbia University’s Donna Shillington. A […]
I’m not seeing anything in this particular arrival that refers to anything being done by human activity which effects the water being subducted into the interior of the earth.
From the introduction I was expecting to see a connection.
Correction:
In this particular *article
The final sentence in this article says there is no missing water in the earth’s oceans.