The Ocean Beneath Your Feet
In a way, you could be walking on water right now. Water is carried to the mantle by deep sea fault zones which penetrate the oceanic plate as it bends into the subduction zone. Subduction, where an oceanic tectonic plate is forced beneath another plate, causes large earthquakes such as the recent Tohoku earthquake, as well as many earthquakes that occur hundreds of kilometers below the Earth's surface. Over the age of the Earth, the Japan subduction zone alone could transport the equivalent of up to three and a half times the water of all the Earth's oceans to its mantle, according to a new paper which shows that deep sea fault zones could transport much larger amounts of water from the Earth's oceans to the upper mantle than previously thought. read more