Believe it or not millions of people living in South East Asia are practically living on the top of a
huge ocean. At least that’s what geological scientists have recently concluded after analysing more than 600,000seismograms. They have estimated that this huge
ocean found in earth’s belly is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean. Live-Science was the first to report the finding of the existence of a vast water-reservoir down below the ground of Eastern Asia. This is the first time that such a huge water body is found inside the planet’s depth. And the credit goes to Michael Wysession, a seismologist at Washington State University in St. Louis and his former graduate student Jesse Lawrence. Details of their study are soon going to appear in a monograph to be published by the American Geophysical Union. The pair of seismologists used instruments scattered around the planet and collected over 600,000 records of
waves generated by earthquakes. They noticed that
seismic waves were dampened or attenuated and also slowed down slightly in a
region beneath Asia. This surly indicated the presence of water. A simplified explanation to this would be as follows. If a cold slab of a ocean floor were to sink thousands of kilometers into the earth’s mantle, the hot temperatures causes the water stored inside the rock to evaporate. This water then rises up and the region above it becomes saturated with water. Wysession says that it would still look like a rock and to find water in it, it would have to be putin a lab. He adds that some ocean floor rocks have water up to 15%. Wysession calls this underground phenomenon as Beijing Anomaly because seismic wave damping and slowing was found to be highest beneath the Chinese capital city Beijing.
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