This fact is established thanks to a new study by Norwegian scientists who told New Scientist that Earth's water is slowly seeping into the earth's crust - although not fast enough to compensate for the rise in sea level that we are currently seeing due to climate change.
A new study, published in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, found that the rate at which the oceans were sinking underground peaked about 150 million years ago when the supercontinent Pangea split apart.
"When a supercontinent breaks, there is a much faster subduction - a tectonic process in the movement of the earth's crust than when less significant fractures of the earth's crust occur," Christer Carlsen, a researcher at the University of Oslo, told New Scientist.
"Rapid subduction is critical to moving water into hydrated rocks deep in the mantle."
Comforting forecast
At the current rate of leakage, the oceans will dry up in about 12 billion years, according to New Scientist.
But this does not mean at all that there is cause for concern, the magazine notes: by that time, the Sun itself as a star has already disappeared.
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Author: Serg Kite