The Book of Genesis describes The Flood. For years, vain people have mocked Genesis 7: 11 “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, and on the seventeenth day of the month, that very day all the springs of the great deep burst through, and the sluices of heaven opened.”
Still, many chose to believe The Bible. It seemed strange to believe that large amounts of water could exist far below the earth’s surface. Those who believed have now been validated. Science is catching up to The Book of Genesis. This recent news release explains how fiction is now being taken very seriously.
A hundred and fifty years ago, in “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”, French science-fiction forerunner Jules Verne pictured a vast sea that lay deep under our planet’s surface.
Today, that strange and haunting image has found an unexpected echo in a scientific paper.
Writing in the journal Nature, scientists on Wednesday said they had found an elusive mineral pointing to the existence of a vast reservoir deep in Earth’s mantle, 400-600 kilometres (250-375 miles) beneath our feet.
It may hold as much water as all the planet’s oceans combined, they believe.
The evidence comes from a water-loving mineral called ringwoodite that came from the so-called transition zone sandwiched between the upper and lower layers of Earth’s mantle, they said.
Analysis shows that a whopping 1.5 percent of the rock comprises molecules of water.
The find backs once-contested theories that the transition zone, or at least significant parts of it, is water-rich, the investigators said.
“This sample really provides extremely strong confirmation that there are local wet spots deep in the Earth in this area,” said Graham Pearson of Canada’s University of Alberta, who led the research.
“That particular zone in the Earth, the transition zone, might have as much water as all the world’s oceans put together.”
Ringwoodite is named after Australian geologist Ted Ringwood, who theorised that a special mineral was bound to be created in the transition zone because of the ultra-high pressures and temperatures there.
In 2008, amateur gem-hunters digging in shallow river gravel in the Juina area of Mato Grasso, Brazil, came across a tiny, grubby stone called a brown diamond.
Measuring just three millimetres (0.12 inches) across and commercially worthless, the stone was acquired by the scientists when they were on a quest for other minerals.
In its interior, they found a microscopic trace of ringwoodite — the very first terrestrial evidence of the ultra-rare rock.
Years of analysis, using spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction, were needed in specialised labs to confirm the find officially as ringwoodite.
If water exists in huge volumes beneath Earth’s crust, it is bound to have a big impact on the mechanics of volcanoes and the movement of tectonic plates.
“One of the reasons the Earth is such a dynamic planet is the presence of some water in its interior. Water changes everything about the way a planet works,” said Pearson.
Now, what was thought by scientists to be ridiculous is accepted by many of them. If you were blessed with the faith to believe, be glad! God loves you!
