A research group led by Kohei Hatakeyama (1st year doctoral student) and Professor Ikuo Katayama of the Graduate School of Science, Hiroshima University has found that the oceanic plate takes in more water than previously expected, and is about 6 million. He proposed a new ocean plate water content model that suggests that the ocean may disappear in years.
On the earth, water circulation works inside as well as on the surface.It is a cycle of taking in seawater into the earth by submerging the water-containing ocean plate and discharging water from the inside of the earth to the ground by degassing volcanoes.
Until now, it has been thought that the uptake of water in the oceanic plate is limited to the oceanic crust, which is the top of the oceanic plate.However, recent seafloor seismic wave exploration has pointed out that water infiltration has reached not only the oceanic crust but also the oceanic mantle below it.Therefore, the research group conducted a permeability experiment on the serpentinite formed when the mantle took in water, and reexamined the total amount of seawater carried into the earth.
As a result, it was estimated that the amount of seawater carried away by the ocean plate into the earth is worth 25 billion tons per year.This is more than twice the amount of decrease in seawater that has been considered in the past, and much more than the amount of water discharged from the inside of the earth due to degassing of volcanoes, etc., and the amount of seawater is decreasing. What suggests.A simple calculation from the current total amount of seawater says that the sea will disappear in about 2 million years.
It has been pointed out that even on Mars, where the desert is now widespread, there may have been a sea in the past.At this rate, the Earth may follow the same fate as Mars.The announcement summarizes what measures should be taken from now on, and it is necessary to consider the global environment from a long-term perspective.
Paper information:[Scientific Reports] Mantle hydration along outer-rise faults inferred from serpentinite permeability
