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A monumental water man-made lake is veil deep beneath the ocean floor off the seacoast of New Zealand — and it may explicate why the realm experience sluggish - motion earthquakes , scientist have found .
A sea ’s worth of water became locked inside volcanic rock-and-roll that formed 120 million to 125 million years ago during the earlyCretaceous , when a lava hook the size of the U.S. burst through Earth ’s crust and solidified into a vast tableland , researchers say in astatement . Thick layers of sediment have since blanketed these rocks and buried any touch of their explosive past 2 miles ( 3 km ) below the Pacific Ocean Davy Jones .
Ancient volcanic rocks were eroded and stored a sea’s worth of water in Earth’s crust as they became buried.
The researchers represent a fault line along the east coast of New Zealand ’s North Island and find that these ancient rock were abnormally " wet , " with H2O making up well-nigh half the volume of cores drilled up from the ocean floor .
" Normal sea crust , once it flummox to be about seven or 10 million years old , should hold in much less water , " sketch Pb authorAndrew Gase , a marine geophysicist and seismologist who conducted the inquiry while at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics ( UTIG ) , said in the statement .
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A seismic image of the Hikurangi plateau reveals details about the Earth’s interior and what it’s made of. The blue-green layer under the yellow line shows water buried within rocks.
Shallow seas that besiege the ancient volcanic plateau may have eat at the rock-and-roll into a poriferous honeycomb , which sponged up water and stored it like an aquifer , concord to the program line . This water - logged terrain easy transformed over the eons , immerse more water as the sway were ground into clay and became sink .
researcher happen upon this subaqueous reservoir 9.3 Roman mile ( 15 kilometer ) from the Hikurangi mistake , or subduction zone , where the Pacific tectonic platedives under the Australian plateand into Earth ’s mantle . The rubbing between these plate grow unusual , irksome - motility earthquake that can last for months and cause almost no scathe at Earth ’s surface . Also known as " dull pillow slip " events , these earthquakesonly occur in a handful of placesacross the globe , include in the Pacific Northwest , Japan , Mexico and New Zealand .
Slow slip-up events are often linked to buried water stores , according to the argument . As one tectonic scale slew under another , water supply contained in the rocks may make high - pressure conditions that retard the process and prevent sudden slips .
The Hikurangi plateau is a remnant of a series of epic volcanic eruptions that began 125 million years ago in the Pacific Ocean. A recent seismic survey (red rectangle) led by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics imaged the plateau as it sinks into New Zealand’s Hikurangi subduction zone (red line).
The newly find piss source may be to thank for the harmless , dull - movement temblor that pass off every one or two years at the Hikurangi faulting , according to the study , published Aug.16 in the journalScience Advances .
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" This is something that we ’ve hypothesized from lab experimentation and is predicted by some reckoner pretence , but there are very few clear field experiments to test this at the scale of a tectonic home , " study co - authorDemian Saffer , the theatre director of UTIG and a prof in the Department of Earth and planetary sciences , order in the program line .
The investigator used seismal scans to build up a 3D paradigm of the underwater region and unwrap the reservoir . But to see how far it stretches into the insolence and confirm its core on pressure around the fault , they will have to drill deep down into the sea level , Gase said .
" We ca n’t see recondite enough to know precisely the effect on the fault , but we can see that the amount of water that ’s going down here is in reality much higher than normal , " he said .
