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If you dive deep America’s northeast coast you’ll discover something shocking below the Atlantic Ocean: freshwater. A huge aquifer of mostly freshwater, hugging the shoreline from New Jersey up to Massachusetts, sits under the ocean floor. It comprises not less than 2800 cubic kilometers (that’s about trillions of gallon) of liquid. That’s enough quantity of water to fill 1.1 billion Olympic-sized swimming pools.
It’s the largest recognized undersea, freshwater aquifer on Earth. However, more importantly, there could also be other such freshwater aquifers prefer it all through the world, a probably large natural useful resource on a planet with the steadily rising population.
The invention was made by researchers from Columbia University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution whereas they have been doing a survey of the ocean floor off the US northeast coast, based on the research, revealed last week in the journal Scientific Reports.
Since at the least the 1970s, companies in the region drilling for oil on the seafloor would sometimes hit pockets of freshwater, but it surely was unclear as to how much water was down there. In 2015, Kerry Key, expertise at Columbia University, and Rob Evans, a geologist and geophysicist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, dropped particular instruments to the ocean floor close to these old oil drill holes to measure electro-magnetic fields and map the water. Since freshwater shouldn’t be nearly as good of a conductor of electromagnetic waves as salt water, the freshwater stood out.
Their analysis confirmed the aquifer, which lies about 600 feet under the ocean floor, ran from the shoreline out to so far as 75 miles away from the coast.
The freshwater in the aquifer would still have to undergo desalinization before it might be used for drinking water because the water is slightly salty because it does combine a little with the saltier ocean water.
