Ocean Under China

Remember the days when we genuinely thought that if you dug deep enough we would end up on the other side of the world? Growing up it was common for us to believe that if in Maine we dug a hole straight through the center of the earth, we would appear in China. Obviously that is not correct. In fact, we would get wet long before we hit the underbelly of China. This information will disclose why. Scientist who scan the earth's interior as a job have found tantalizing evidence of a large ocean type water mass under Eastern Asia that is at least as large as the Arctic Ocean.

According to Live Science.com the impressive body of water was found by Michael Wysession who is a seismologist and one of his former graduate students Jesse Lawrence. Michael is a seismologist at the Washington University in St. Louis. According to LiveScience.com this discovery will mark the first time a large body of water has been found in the Earth's deep mantle. In April of 2005 scientists had drilled to the lower Section of Earth's crust for the first time and were ready to drill to the center core. With these drillings came many core samples which will be showing many different realities to a very over simplified recount currently of the Earth's history. The drillers had applied the JOIDES Resolution vessel to drill and take thousands of probes and seismogram. The JOIDES is now a 12 year 1.5 billion dollar program paid for by the NSF and Japan's Ministry of Education. According to LiveScience.com Michael and Jesse will do a relevant detail presentation in a monograph that will be published by the American Geophysical Union. A monograph, according to Wikipedia is a scholarly book or report.

Michael and Jesse had analyzed over 600,000 seismograms, which are massive waves caused by earthquakes, and the JOIDES Resolution vehicle. As the two did this, they discovered an area under Asia where the seismic waves dampened and further slowed down. According to LiveScience.com, Michael plainly claimed water slows the pace of waves and a lot of damping and a little slowing will match their forecast for water. Michael has named their discovery as the Beijing anomaly. This is because the biggest change in seismic waves occurred below Beijing.

I definitely found this interesting to say the least that there may be oceans under our continents that are as large as oceans.

The Earth's radius is approximately 4,000 miles. The Earth has 3 main layers starting with the crust, then mantle, and then the core. This all starts about 18 miles under our continents according to LiveScience.com.