So much about the earth remains such a mystery, while the world over there are likely to be shortages in drinking water supplies, a seismologists has discovered the possibility of an underground reservoir of water the volume of the Arctic Ocean beneath the earth’s crust.
From the Washington University in St. Louis, he has made the first 3-D model of seismic wave damping, diminishing, deep in the Earth’s mantle
Michael E. Wysession, Ph.D., Washington University professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, working with former graduate student Jesse Lawrence (now at the University of California, San Diego), analyzed 80,000 shear waves from more than 600,000 seismograms and found a large area in Earth’s lower mantle beneath eastern Asia where water is damping out, or attenuating, seismic waves from earthquakes.
Scientists get a sort of CAT scan of the Earth’s core by measuring the speed of seismic waves. Looking at the seismic wave speeds and attenuation at the same time can tell whether an anomaly is due to temperature or water. The research will be fully described in the monograph, Earth’s Deep Water Cycle.
Source: Science Blog