Earth's groundwater was enough to submerge continents below 180 meters

The Earth has a huge reserve of water underground, enough to submerge the continents under a depth of 180m or cause the sea level to rise 52m if it spills across the globe.

Discover huge reserves of fresh water in Earth's heart

According to New Scientist, humans can only use a small amount of groundwater in the Earth's heart. This amount of water will help governments manage water resources in response to rising demand.

People are increasingly dependent on groundwater from wells and streams for drinking water and irrigation for agriculture. However, hydrologists do not really know how much groundwater is available and how quickly the water is regenerated through rain and snow melt .

New groundwater is renewed through rain and snow.(Photo: New Scientist).

To solve this problem, Tom Gleeson, a hydrogeologist at Victoria University, Canada, and his colleagues used a byproduct of testing thermonuclear weapons: radioactive tritium from explosions. above the ground . According to them, high groundwater containing tritium is the new water that seeps into the ground from nuclear testing about 50 years ago.

Gleeson's team collected nearly 3,800 groundwater samples to measure tritium and used them to map new groundwater sources at different depths on the ground. Then, based on the models, they can predict the total amount of groundwater available, in the holes in the rocks and aquifers.

The top two kilometers of the Earth's crust contain nearly 23 million cubic kilometers of groundwater. This conclusion is consistent with preliminary calculations 40 years ago. But researchers have discovered that groundwater only accounts for less than 6% of the total amount.

New groundwater fills up through rainwater and water seeps into the ground for decades, a potentially renewable water source. According to Gleeson, the rest is too deep or too separate from the surface to receive additional water for half a decade, and is considered an irreversible source of water.

Although only a small amount of groundwater is regularly filled, this is still a huge reserve, several times larger than the total size of all rivers and lakes in the world combined as noted by Richard Taylor, a geologist. Hydrology at University of London, England.