In the depths of the Earth’s past, the ice landscape has become sesscape while the ice melt and the ocean declining is now northeastern the United States. For nearly 50 years, an American government ship has been searching for minerals and hydrocarbons in the area engraved on the sea floor to see what you can find.
I found, from all things, to fall under the homogeneous deep – fresh water.
This summer, a unique global research trip Follow this surprise. Drilling freshwater below the salt water off the Cape Code, extracted Xpridation 501 thousand samples from what is now believed to be the huge and hidden groundwater layer that extends from New Jersey in the far north of Maine.
It is just one of many deposits for “secret fresh water” known for its presence in shallow salty waters around the world that may one day be exploited to clear Thirsty planet condensationBrandon Dogan, the scientist participating in the capital, said.
“We need to search for every possibility of us to find more water for society,” Dogan, Geophysical scientist and hydros scientist at Colorado School of Mines, told reporters in Associated Press who recently spent 12 hours on the drilling platform. The search teams looked at “one of the last places that you might look for for fresh water on the ground.”
They found this, and they will analyze nearly 50,000 liters (13,209 gallons) of them in their laboratories all over the world in the coming months. They are outside to solve the mystery of its origins – whether the water is from ice rivers, the groundwater connected water systems on the ground or a mixture.
The capabilities are enormous. They are also obstacles to removing water and confusion about those who possess it, and those who use it and how to extract it without unjustified harm to nature. It must take years to bring this water to the beach for public use in a big way, if possible.
The old Mariner told us about this
Why try? Within only five years, the United Nations says, global demand for fresh water The supplies will exceed 40 %. High sea levels of warming climate disturb coastal water sources, while data centers that operate artificial intelligence and cloud computing consume water at an uncertain rate.
Cylinder Old Mariner lament“Water, water, everywhere, and no drop to drink”, waving on the horizon as a warning to local people as well as sailors in the salty seas.
In Virginia alone, a quarter of all the authority produced in the state He goes to data centersA share that is expected to double for nearly five years. Through some estimates, each center consumes average data. Each of the Great Lakes countries witnessed a lack of groundwater.
Cape Town, South Africa, It came closely fraught with dangers It is running out of fresh water for approximately 5 million people in 2018 during epic dehydration for three years. South Africa is believed to have a reward for coastal coastal freshwater as well, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that every continent may have the same.
Prince Edward Island in Canada, Hawaii and Jakarta, Indonesia, is among the places where the fresh water supplies are coexist with potential groundwater layers under the ocean.
Enter Expedition 501, which is a scientific cooperation of $ 25 million for more than ten countries supported by the National Corporation of the National Science of the United States and the European Union to dig ocean research (US funds were secured before the budget discounts requested by the Trump administration).
Scientists have gone to the project who believed that the groundwater layer below the surface of the sea, from which they were taking samples, may be sufficient to meet the needs of the capital the size of New York City for 800 years. They found fresh water almost or almost in the depths of the sea bottom above, which indicates more supplies.
Exercise, baby, drilling. Water
Their actions were revealed at sea for three months from the lift boat, Robert, a peripheral ship, once on the site, lowering three huge columns to the sea and squatting over the waves. It usually does information technology on oil sites abroad and wind farms. This excavation task was different.
“It is known that this phenomenon is here and other places around the world,” said the director of the Expound 501 Jiz Everest project, a scientist who came from the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, Scotland, about sea water. “But it is a subject that has not been investigated directly by any research project in the past.”
Therefore, it means that no person systematically dug systematically at the sea floor on a mission to find fresh water. Expered 501 was literally a pioneer – the Earth was penetrated under the sea by up to 1,289 feet or nearly 400 meters.
But I followed a research project in 2015, which defined the features of the groundwater layer from a distance, using electromagnetic technology, and the salinity of the water under it.
That task, by the Woods Hall Oceanic Foundation and Lamont-Dooherty Earth at Columbia University, Evidence reported From the “huge groundwater layer system” in this field, it may compete with a larger size – Ogallala groundwater layerWhich supplies water into parts of eight large plains.
In 1976, two development raised the search for fresh water below the sea.
In the center of Nantukte island, the American geological survey dug a good test to see to what extent the groundwater went. He – she Fresh water extraction From great depths, scientists wonder if the water came from the sea, not the sky.
In the same year, that federal agency It launched a 60 -day exploration trip On the concept of the Glomar’s drilling ship along a vast extension of the continental shelf from Georgia to Georges Bank off New England. The cores have dug in search of Sub-CEABED resources, such as methane.
An open -eye amount of fresh or fresh water was found in the well after a well.
This paves the way for water students to do their work half a century later.
Eureka’s moment comes early
Shortly after Robert’s arrival to the first three drilling sites on May 19, samples were extracted from the bottom of the salinity registered at the sea floor from only 4 parts per thousand. This is much lower than the average salt content in the ocean of 35 parts per thousand, but it is still very vaccinated to meet the American fresh water standard less than one part per thousand.
Dogan said: “It was four parts per thousand Eurica moment,” because the result indicates that the water should be linked to a terrestrial system in the past, or still.
With the heights of the weeks and Robert moved from one location to another from 20 to 30 miles (from 30 to 50 km) from the coast, the drilling process to the sediments under the aquatic sea a group of samples resulted in one part per thousand salt content. Some were less.
Bengo. This is what you find in many surfaces of fresh water on the ground. This water that you can drink, in theory. No one did.
Do not drink water yet
In months of the next analysis, scientists will discuss a set of water properties, including what the microbes were living in the depths, and what they used for nutrients and energy sources and what are the secondary products that you might generate; In other words, whether the water is safe to consume or use it in another way.
“This is a new environment that has not been studied before,” said Jocelin Deroiro, a biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who studies the microbial environment for the maximum environments and does not participate in the campaign.
She said: “The water may contain minerals harmful to human health because it escapes through layers of sediments.” “However, a similar process forms the groundwater layers that we use for freshwater, usually very high quality.”
Through the sequence of the DNA extracted from their samples, she said, researchers can identify existing microorganisms and “learn how to gain living.”
Determine the life of the water
key
Technologies will also be used to determine whether it comes from ice ice melting for thousands of years or is still coming through the geological formations adjacent to the ground.
The researchers will date again in the laboratory, and this will be a key to determining whether a renewed resource can be used with responsibility. Primitive water is besieged and limited. More water indicates that the groundwater layer is still connected to a ground source and is updated, but slowly.
Dogan said: “The youngest means that it was rain drops 100 years ago, 200 years ago,” Dogan said. “If he is a young man, it is a recharge.”
These questions are for basic sciences. For society, all kinds of complex questions arise if the basic science emphasizes the conditions necessary for water exploitation. Who will manage it? Can it be taken without an unacceptable danger from the pollution of the width from the above? Will it be cheaper or friendly than the energy desalination factories for energy today?
Dogan said if governments decide to get water, local communities can turn into groundwater layers at the time of need, such as dehydration, or when severe storms are flooded and destroyed by coastal fresh water reserves. The idea of using this old buried water is actually new to the point that it was not on the radar of many policy makers or conservative preservation.
“He studied the time it can take sometimes to achieve these things, and the perseverance needed to get there. There is a lot of excitement they have recently obtained,” said geophysics scientist Rob Evans for 2015.
However, some red flags see. One of them is that clicking on the groundwater layers under the sea can attract water away from wild reserves. The other is that the groundwater below the surface of the sea that leaks to the sea floor may provide vital nutrients of the ecological system, and this may be upset.
“If we go out and start pumping this water, there are certainly unexpected consequences,” he said. “There is a lot of balance that we need to take into account before we start diving, digging and exploiting these types of things.”
They are far from home
For most of them in the project, reaching the elevator boat Robert means a journey of seven hours or more of Val River, Massachusetts, on a supply boat that made round trips every 10 days or so to renew stocks and rotate people.
On the platform, around the clock around the clock, the cavity pipeline and mineral machines, the drilling and the softening food with the most quieter and cleaner of scientists in the trailers that were converted into primitive laboratories and processing posts.
There, samples were treated according to the changing needs of geological scientists, geologists, hydrology scientists, microbiologists, sediments and more.
Passing through transparent plastic tubes, Muck was cut into tablets such as hockey balls. Water pressure machines. Some samples have been closed to enable the study of old melted gases in the water. Other samples are frozen, nominated or left as they are, depending on this purpose.
Six months after the laboratory analysis, all science teams in Experedion 501 will meet again – this time in Germany for a month of cooperative research that is expected to produce preliminary results indicating the era and origin of water.
On July 31, the Liftboat Robert team installed its legs from this place of hidden water to end a task that provided credibility to another corridor from the “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the poem of Samuel Taylor Colorridge’s classic about life, death and puzzles in the sea.
In an introduction to the poem, in some of the editions, Colleridge wrote: “I easily think that there is more invisible than the visual nature in the universe.”
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Woodward I mentioned from Seekonk, Massachusetts.
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