The global warming caused by the greenhouse effect is causing the arctic and antarctic glaciers to melt at a speed visible to the naked eye, and the resulting sea level rise has become a disaster that all of us have to face.
Under the influence of sea level rise, some countries will even be completely submerged by seawater, Tuvalu is the most typical representative, the highest altitude of no more than 5 meters of island country, only between 1993 and 2009, the national sea level rose by nearly 10 cm, and in the increasing greenhouse effect, Tuvalu will likely become the first country to be submerged by seawater...
However, it is worth mentioning that at the moment when the crisis of sea level rise is becoming more and more severe, some scientists have found that the Mariana Trench is frantically "swallowing water", and the speed of swallowing water is very amazing, and the annual water swallowing water can even reach 3 billion tons!
So will global sea levels fall as a result? Where did the water swallowed up by the Mariana Trench go?
The Mariana Trench is swallowing water in a "madness"!
Back in 2015, in order to conduct more in-depth research on the Mariana Trench, a scientific team installed some high-precision listening instruments in the depths of the trench, which can monitor most of the sound waves coming from inside the trench, including marine biological activities and even sound waves of seabed movements, which can be detected by listening instruments.
After 4 months of sonic wave collection, the scientists found a strange sound wave from the collected sound wave data, which is different from any previous sound wave found, it is a stable and continuous sound wave. At first it was thought that this might be a kind of murmur sound wave from a listening instrument, but this view was quickly rejected because the murmur sound wave could not be so strong.
Later, after a lot of research, scientists finally determined the source of sound waves, that is, the continuous and stable "sound of water flow". But the new question arises, how can there be a flowing "dark river" at the bottom of the Mariana Trench?
The Mariana Trench is precisely in the subduction zone of two major plates, and under the squeeze of the two plates, the geological activity here has become extremely frequent. As a result, the bottom of the Mariana Trench is prone to geological phenomena such as earthquakes and submarine volcanic eruptions.
In the process of squeezing the two plates, the edge of the plate will also produce a "staggered" phenomenon, at which time the marine plate will go deep below the land plate, and the "staggered" position of the two will form a huge deep fissure, and the emergence of this fissure is also the "root" of the water swallowed by the Mariana Trench.
According to the scientific team's estimates, the Mariana Trench is swallowing up seawater at an unimaginable rate, swallowing at least more than 3 billion tons of water per year. It should be known that the water in the west lake on the mainland is only 14.29 million tons, which means that the Mariana Trench can swallow about 214 west lakes per year. Isn't it a little scary to think about?
Where did the swallowed sea go?
Seeing this, I think many people will have such a question, that is, where did these seawaters that were swallowed up by the Mariana Trench for no reason end up?
To figure out this problem, we have to return to the topic of plate structure, friends who have studied geography should know that our earth's interior is divided into multiple layers of different structures, under the crust plate, there is a dense layer of high-temperature mantle, magma is the lava fluid from the upper mantle.
When the two plates at the bottom of the Mariana Trench "stagger" during the process of squeezing, the huge fissures in the "staggered" positions extend all the way to the mantle, and the seawater that has been swallowed into the fissure will flow down the fissure into the mantle.
Of course, this is not the final destination of the seawater, because the temperature of the mantle is extremely high, and a large amount of seawater will be vaporized and evaporated before it flows into the mantle.
Although some water enters the mantle, it will also be accompanied by the activity of volcanoes and submarine volcanoes in the next step, and will erupt together with magma, you know, about 60% of the components of magma are water vapor.
In this part of the seawater that enters the mantle, in addition to merging into the mantle, a part will be "absorbed", and the Lynnwood stone found by scientists in the mantle on the seabed is the best evidence.
Researchers have reported in the journal Science that the presence of Lynnwood stone frees water from the common liquid, gaseous or solid form of existence, and exists in the form of simple water molecules in this blue rock.
And there are a large number of Lynnwood stones in the mantle, and the amount of water contained in it may even be 3 times the total amount of water in the surface ocean!
Seawater is swallowed up in large quantities, will sea level drop?
Although more than 3 billion tons of seawater are swallowed up by the Mariana Trench every year, the combined destination of these swallowed seawater and the total amount of seawater on the earth (about 13.6 billion tons) will not fall.
Therefore, it is simply not feasible to rely solely on the swallowing of water from the Mariana Trench to mitigate the problem of sea-level rise caused by the greenhouse effect.
To solve this problem, we can only find ways to alleviate the intensification of the greenhouse effect, but for now, under the influence of climatic conditions, the intensification of the greenhouse effect seems to have entered a "vicious circle", if we can not come up with a perfect way to deal with the greenhouse effect in the future, Venus and Mars may be the final outcome of our earth...
The question arises again, how exactly should we deal with the greenhouse effect?