The Bowels Of The Earth Contain A Thousand Times More Water Than Baikal - Alternative View

The Bowels Of The Earth Contain A Thousand Times More Water Than Baikal - Alternative View
The Bowels Of The Earth Contain A Thousand Times More Water Than Baikal - Alternative View

Video: The Bowels Of The Earth Contain A Thousand Times More Water Than Baikal - Alternative View

Video: The Bowels Of The Earth Contain A Thousand Times More Water Than Baikal - Alternative View
Video: Панама (Ян Топлес/Ян Лапотков и Надежда Сысоева). Орёл и Решка. 10 лет 2024, March
Anonim

Geologists for the first time accurately calculated the volume of water contained in the bowels of our planet, and came to the conclusion that the soil and deep layers of rocks hide in themselves almost a thousand times more moisture than is contained in Baikal, the largest freshwater lake on Earth.

Geologists for the first time accurately calculated the volume of water contained in the bowels of our planet, and came to the conclusion that the soil and deep layers of rocks hide in themselves almost a thousand times more moisture than is contained in Baikal, the largest freshwater lake on Earth, the article says. published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

In recent years, the inhabitants of the Earth are increasingly faced with interruptions or complete lack of access to drinking and just fresh water, some of which are associated with the growing density of the world's population, and others with climate change and a drop in precipitation. For this reason, assessing the reserves of groundwater and groundwater that feed all rivers, lakes and other surface water bodies has become a vital task for scientists.

Tomas Gleeson from the University of Victoria (Canada) and his colleagues first tried to estimate the volumes of these waters using data collected with the help of satellites, ground observations and obtained from studying the structure of the Earth's interior at different points on its surface at depths of about two kilometers.

As the scientists explain, all groundwater can be divided into three layers - the so-called "modern" groundwater, which returns to the surface within a few days, weeks or years, and into "young" and "ancient" waters, which are carried in the deep layers breeds for several centuries or millennia.

Their age, volume and nature of the cycle, according to Gleason, can be revealed quite accurately by measuring the concentration of tritium - a radioactive isotope of hydrogen - and a number of other substances in samples of groundwater, as well as the porosity and other physical properties of the rocks that contain this water.

In total, scientists were able to obtain data on the concentration of tritium at more than 3700 points on the Earth's surface, some of which they obtained themselves, while others were made by other groups of geologists and chemists. All of this data Gleason and his colleagues used to compile a three-dimensional "map" of groundwater.

As these measurements showed, the upper layer of the earth's crust contains relatively modest volumes of water - about 100 thousand cubic kilometers of moisture, which is about 4.5 times more than that contained in Lake Baikal, and which is approximately equal to the total volume of fresh water on the Earth's surface … It is distributed extremely unevenly - it is almost absent in the driest regions, and very much in those parts of the world where there are no problems with surface water.

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At greater depths, from 1.5 kilometers to two kilometers, there are orders of magnitude more water, whose total volume is about 22.6 million cubic kilometers, which is already a thousand times more than Baikal contains.

Here water spends tens and hundreds of thousands of years, very slowly rising to the surface or remaining trapped inside layers of sedimentary rocks. These reserves of moisture, according to the researchers, may be of interest to geologists, climatologists and other representatives of the earth sciences, as they contain information about how the Earth lived millions of years ago.

The relatively small amount of fresh groundwater in the upper layers of the crust suggests that its reserves are even more depleted than we believe today. This, scientists hope, will force the inhabitants of the planet to think about a more economical approach to the use of surface and groundwater.