The Mariana Trench is swallowing a large amount of seawater, 3 billion tons per year! Why didn't the sea level drop?

Guixu, where the waters of heaven and earth come and go, is a bottomless ravine, about 10,000 miles deep. This is the description of the land of return to the ruins in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and the Mariana Sea is such a place.

According to human research, the earth has four poles. In addition to the north and south poles, there are also the highest and lowest points, which are Mount Everest and the Mariana Trench. The Mariana Trench, known as the "Scar of the Earth", has the world's deepest trench, and even the most advanced scientific detectors cannot probe its depth.

Mariana Trench

It is like an active whirlpool, greedily rolling all the sea water into his cradle, which undoubtedly arouses the curiosity of human beings, such a huge mouth of the abyss, where does the sea water devoured by it flow to? And since so much water is lost every year, why are our sea levels still rising?

Mariana Trench

From ancient times to the present, human exploration of the unknown has been hanging in the air. Take Mount Everest, in the recent hot search on Weibo, an aging climber has climbed Mount Everest four times. In the first time, my feet were frozen due to insufficient thermal insulation measures. After a long training recovery, he finally summited Mount Everest for the last time. This spirit of exploration is eloquent.

Mariana Trench

With the development of the times, human beings have always continued this spirit, and began to explore the scars of the earth, the Mariana Sea. This place of return is located in the Pacific Ocean, with a total length of about 2,550 kilometers and a width of 70 kilometers. According to research, the formation of this trench can be traced back to 60 million years ago. Some people have compared Mount Everest with it, and the results show that the Mariana Trench will completely swallow Mount Everest, leaving no hope.

Mariana Trench

These two extremes are caused by the movement of the crust and the collision of the plates. The trench is a common geographical feature in the ocean. It is like a hollow top without a top. This top is usually more than 7 kilometers deep. According to incomplete statistics , there are more than 37 ocean trenches in the world, some of which are yet to be explored.

The Mariana Trench is distributed in the Pacific Ocean, which has the most trenches. It is located in the deepest part of the ocean, with strong water pressure and cold and no light. But in order to learn more about the world, in 1915, the British deep-sea exploration robot dived into the deep sea and measured the depth of the trench to be about 10,900 meters.

Mariana Trench

With the advancement of science and technology, Japan has made this data more accurate after this, which is 10916 meters. Of course, this is definitely not the final data of the Mariana Trench, and after that, more and more researchers and deep-sea enthusiasts have devoted themselves to this exploration.

Where does the seawater sucked in by the trench go?

Knowing the depth and characteristics of the Mariana Trench, we can't help but wonder, where does the inhaled seawater go? Some people think that in the era of extremely backward technology thousands of years ago, the ancients could put forward the concept of returning to the ruins. Is there a special god who controls the ruins in this world, and maintains the balance of the ruins year after year, quietly and silently. Return this seawater back to the ocean. But in the face of today's high-tech technology, we certainly do not believe in such absurd legends.

The Legend of "Returning to the Ruins" in "The Classic of Mountains and Seas"

According to the structure of the earth, under the trench is the earth's crust. Does this water flow into the earth's crust through some means, and then flow to other places through some activities? Under the results of the current scientific and technological exploration, the answer is yes. Guixu is a bottomless abyss, but the Mariana Trench is not. The earth is a sphere suspended in the universe, so the end of the ground is ultimately interstellar.

internal structure of the earth

The crust is a hard shell, we can imagine it as an egg, but the composition of this egg is rock, it is also the outermost layer of the entity we can see with the naked eye, and scientists have found that the thinnest part of the crust happens to be The location of the Mariana Trench. During the movement of the earth's crust, these seawater will flow into the depths of the earth through the ravines in the earth's crust.

Where did the sea water end up?

The Mariana Trench swallows tens of billions of tons of seawater every year, but the sea level has not dropped. Are these seawater still existing deep in the ground? How can these be explained according to scientific principles? A word we hear a lot is "loop back and forth". Everything has its destination and source, and there is no absolute existence.

water cycle in nature

In nature, the most important cycle is the water cycle. In the geography textbook for junior high school, we can see that rainwater flows through mountains and lakes and eventually turns into steam and returns to its original form. This is a simple water cycle.

But under the mountains and rivers, the water cycle is carried out rapidly in an environment that is invisible to the human eye, which we call groundwater. Due to the strong attraction of the eddies in the Mariana Trench, the surrounding seawater is continuously sucked into the trench. However, the seawater engulfed by the Mariana Sea did not accumulate there for many years, but entered the earth's crust through the water cycle and flowed into the earth's interior. Under the large-scale oceanic crust hydration, it returned to the ocean through the mountains in the ocean.

Crustal Movement

This process is not easy. We previously learned that the Mariana Trench is caused by crustal movement and plate activity , but the Mariana Trench will not continue to absorb seawater when plate activity stops. This seems to have little effect on the Mariana Sea. If it is to die to the end, it can only show that plate activity has not stopped.

The continuous earthquakes in the ocean continue, and this series of water cycles are also proceeding in an orderly manner. Therefore, the seawater in the Mariana Trench circulates back and forth in nature.

glacial melting

This is also the reason why the earth's sea level never falls. However, under the research of natural scientists, the current sea level has not fallen but risen, which is caused by the melting of glaciers caused by human activities. We know that the earth is a huge ecosystem that requires regular cycles, more or less of which is not enough.

According to incomplete statistics, the annual melting volume of glaciers can be comparable to that of Mount Everest. If this continues, the sea level will rise by more than 4m in a few decades, and countless humans, animals and plants will be homeless. returnable.