The Mariana Trench is devouring seawater, about 3 billion tons a year, so why is sea level continuing to rise? The ocean has always been a mysterious world that human beings are curious about and yearn for, especially the Mariana Trench, which is known as the abyss of challengers, and has long become a treasure land favored by explorers and researchers from all over the world.
In the process of exploration, scientists have not only discovered strange marine life, but also discovered a strange phenomenon - the mystery of swallowing water. At the end of 2018, the journal Nature published a paper that said that when scientists studied the Mariana Trench, they found that it was devouring seawater, about 3 billion tons of seawater per year. So the question is, where does the water swallowed up by the Mariana Trench every year go? And the Mariana Trench swallows up a lot of seawater, why does the sea level rise instead of falling?
Mariana Trench
The Mariana Trench is located on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean near the Mariana Islands. Viewed from the air, the trench is crescent-shaped, running 2550 kilometers from north to south, while only 70 kilometers wide. Like a machete, it cuts deep into the bottom of the ocean. This trench is famous because it is currently known as the deepest part of the ocean. After continuous exploration by scientists, it can only be explored to 10925 meters below the sea. This depth is enough to accommodate the world's highest mountain, Mount Everest, and if it is thrown into the Mariana Trench, Mount Everest will need to grow at least more than 2,000 meters before it can leak out of the sea level. However, 10925 meters is only the known depth of mankind, not the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, in today's era of advanced technology, even scientists can not accurately measure the depth of the Mariana Trench, this is because the Mariana Trench has an extremely harsh geographical environment.
The water pressure at the deepest point of the Mariana Trench known to mankind is 110 megapascals, that is, 11,000 tons per square meter. This is equivalent to putting a one-ton car on your finger. In addition, the sea area is dark all year round, low temperature and a series of harsh environments, making the Mariana Trench become the "fourth pole" of the earth after the Antarctic, the Arctic, and Mount Everest. The depth of the Mariana Trench and the mysteries of the seabed have become the reason why scientists continue to explore. However, in the process of exploration, they discovered the strange water-swallowing mystery of the Mariana Trench.
The mystery of the swallowing water in the Mariana Trench
Mentioning the swallowing of seawater in the Mariana Trench requires understanding the causes of the Mariana Trench. On Earth, there are six major plates, of which the remaining five plates are both land and sea, except for the Pacific Plate, which is almost all oceanic. The two sides of the Mariana Trench are the Pacific Plate and the Eurasian Plate, when the plate movement impact, due to the greater density of the Pacific Plate, the lower position, the Pacific Plate will swoop below the Eurasian Plate, and the subducting plate after entering the mantle, due to the high temperature caused by the plate gradually melting and disappearing, and then formed in the center of the collision of the Mariana Trench, at the same time, it is also the boundary zone of the two plates.
Marine geological movements in the boundary zone of the plates are very active and frequent, while the mantle temperature is very high and viscous. Under the action of thermal convection, the mantle will move slowly, which will drive the crust plates to move together. During subduction, a large amount of seawater pours into the mantle, that is, every minute and every second, the seawater is carried into the mantle by plate movement, resulting in the Phenomenon of the Mariana Trench constantly swallowing up the seawater. According to the scientists' findings, the Mariana Trench devours about 3 billion tons of seawater each year.
Where does the sea that Mariana swallows go?
The seawater swallowed by Mariana will not disappear in a vacuum. A part of the seawater enters the mantle, and under the dual action of the pressure and temperature of the mantle, the seawater will combine with other elements to form Lynnwood stone. Lynnwood stone has a very high content of water molecules, about every million crystal molecules, there will be more than two thousand water molecules, and this rock is generally distributed between the earth's crust and mantle, and forms a huge aquifer at a depth of 410 km to 660 km, with a water content of three times that of the Earth's oceans. The remaining seawater will participate in the earth's water cycle, through other ways, such as volcanic eruptions, volcanic eruptions will release a large amount of gas, the largest component of which is water vapor, these water vapor into the atmosphere, under the constant change of temperature, will fall back into the ocean in various forms such as rainfall, snowfall and so on. A portion of the seawater that enters the mantle also evaporates due to excessive temperatures, eventually returning to the ocean as a hot spring on the ocean floor.
Swallowing up seawater, why does the sea level rise instead of falling?
The reason why sea level has not fallen today is because the earth has a strong water circulation system to maintain a stable state of sea level, but the emergence of humans has broken this situation. With the passage of time, human beings entered the industrial age, began to use a large amount of fossil energy, and constantly emitted a large number of harmful gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, exacerbating global warming, causing polar glaciers to melt at an alarming rate, which led to rising sea levels. Scientists predict that if the polar glaciers melt completely, it will be enough to turn coastal cities into underwater cities.