Article by: Andacs Robert Eugen, on 13 November 2022, at 08:51 am PST

Researchers say they have found new evidence of the existence of an "ocean" inside the Earth.

After analyzing an extremely rare diamond believed to have formed at a depth of about 650 kilometers beneath Botswana, an international team of researchers concluded in a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience that the boundary between the upper mantle and the lower part of our planet - a region known as the transition zone, which stretches hundreds of kilometers into the Earth's interior - contains much more water and carbon dioxide than previously thought.

The research could have profound implications for understanding Earth's water cycle and how it has evolved into the oceanic world we know today over the past 4.5 billion years.

"In this study, we demonstrated that the transition zone is not a dry sponge, but holds considerable amounts of water," Frank Brenker, a researcher at the Institute of Geosciences at Goethe University in Frankfurt, said in a statement. "It also brings us one step closer to Jules Verne's idea that there is an ocean at the center of the Earth."

This "tank" could be extraordinary in total volume. "These sediments can hold large amounts of water and CO2," Branker added.

In fact, according to the statement cited, the transition zone alone could contain up to six times the amount of water present in all of Earth's oceans combined. Scientists already suspected that Earth's transition zone contained a lot of water after analyzing a similar diamond in 2014, but the latest research adds credence to that theory.

"If we only had one sample, it might just be a local water region," Suzette Timmerman, a geochemist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta told Scientific American, "whereas now that we have the second sample, we can already say that it is not just a single appearance".