Researchers have identify a jumbo man-made lake of water system , hidden beneath the Pacific Ocean . The find may excuse why nearby New Zealand experience " slow - motion " earthquakes , which can last up to months , while causing comparatively trivial or no terms to the smother region .
One team , attempting to find out why slide events take shoes at some faults more than others , discover throughseismic imagingthat a massive underwater man-made lake was trapped in the rocks . see the area , researchers found that heavyset , layered deposit surrounded ancient buriedvolcanoes .
Looking at Mandrillus leucophaeus core samples of volcanic rock from the arena , the team find that weewee made up nearly half of its bulk .
The rocks beneath the volcanoes are fluid-rich.Image credit: Andrew Gase
" Normal ocean crust , once it gets to be about 7 or 10 million years former should contain much less piddle , " postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics ( UTIG ) , and generator on the newspaper publisher , Andrew Gase said in astatement , adding , “ We ca n’t yet see deep enough to know exactly the effect on the fault , but we can see that the amount of water that ’s travel down here is in reality much mellow than normal . "
It is believed that weewee insistency are key to slow - slickness events . Normally , this would happen where body of water - rich sediment is entomb by the fault as one plate sinks , but here Gase believe that gnaw , porous volcanic rock containing large amount of water got buried by the error , before turning to clay .
The team is sharp to drill more samples for subject field , but believe the fluid play its part in dampeningearthquakesfrom the fault .
“ It ’s a really clear illustration of the correlation between fluids and the panache of tectonic defect bm – including temblor behavior , ” UTIG Director Demian Saffer added . “ This is something that we ’ve theorise from lab experimentation , and is predicted by some computer simulations , but there are very few unmortgaged field of study experiments to test this at the scale of a tectonic home . ”
The study is published inScience Advances .
