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A gigantic freshwater aquifer is hiding under the salty Atlantic Ocean, just off the northeastern coast of the United States, a new study finds.
Table of contents

• The Atlantic Crossword
• Massive Freshwater Supply Found Trapped Under The Ocean
• A Massive Freshwater Sea Is Buried Beneath the Atlantic Ocean | Live Science
• Coastal science and societies

The team also towed an apparatus behind the ship which emitted artificial electromagnetic pulses and recorded the reactions from the sub-seafloor. Researchers say salt water is a better conductor of electromagnetic waves than fresh water, so the freshwater stood out as a band of low conductance. The data gathered allowed researchers to infer that freshwater sediments continuously span New Jersey and Massachusetts, but also the intervening coasts of Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York.

Researchers say the finding suggests that other aquifers may lie off many other coasts worldwide, and could potentially provide desperately needed water or in areas that are in danger of running out. Researchers found the aquifer is freshest near the shore and becomes saltier further out, suggesting it mixes gradually with ocean water over time. Around 15, to 20, years ago when the ice melted at the end of the last glacial age, sediments formed river deltas on top of the shelf, and fresh water became trapped in scattered pockets as sea levels rose.

As water from water bodies and rainfall percolates through onshore sediments, it is likely pumped seaward by rising and falling pressure tides, Key explained. Get a roundup of the most important and intriguing national stories delivered to your inbox every weekday. Want to discuss? Please read our Commenting Policy first. World Canada Local. Scientists discover giant freshwater reservoir beneath the Atlantic ocean. Full Menu Search Menu.

Close Local your local region National. Search Submit search Suggested Search. Close X. Scroll back to top of the page Back to top. By Hannah Jackson Global News. I wanted to write about the project, and he agreed to let me join him on a later leg.

When his ship departed, in the spring of , I followed online as it pursued a course to the Kermadec Trench, in the Pacific, and Shank began sending Nereus on a series of dives. On the first, it descended to 6, meters, a modest target on the boundary of the hadal zone. On the second, Shank pushed it to 7, meters; on the third to 8,; and on the fourth to 9, He knew that diving to 10, meters would be a crucial threshold. It is the last full kilometer of depth on Earth: No trench is believed to be deeper than 11, meters. To commemorate this final increment and the successful beginning of his project, he attached a pair of silver bracelets to the frame of Nereus, planning to give them to his daughters when he returned home.

Then he dropped the robot in the water and retreated to the control room to monitor its movements. On-screen, blue water gave way to darkness as Nereus descended, its headlamps illuminating specks of debris suspended in the water. It was 10 meters shy of the 10,meter mark when suddenly the screen went dark. There was an audible gasp in the control room, but no one panicked.

The Atlantic Crossword

Losing the video feed on a dive was relatively common. Maybe the fiber-optic tether had snapped, or the software had hit a glitch. Whatever it was, Nereus had been programmed to respond with emergency measures. As the minutes ticked by, Shank waited for those measures to activate, but none did. The following day he finally saw debris surface, and as he watched it rise, he felt his project sinking.

We were standing on the deck of another ship, miles off the coast of Massachusetts, where Shank was preparing to launch a new robot. The vehicle was no replacement for Nereus.

It was a rectilinear hunk of metal and plastic, about five feet high, three feet wide, and nine feet long. Shank had no illusion that it was capable of hadal exploration. Read: Goodbye forever, beloved deep-sea robot. Its navigational system was even more advanced than the one in Nereus, and he hoped it would be able to maneuver in a trenchlike environment with even greater precision—but its body was not designed to withstand hadal pressure.

In fact, it had never descended more than a few dozen feet below the surface, and Shank knew that it would take years to build something that could survive at the bottom of a trench. What had seemed, just two years earlier, like the beginning of a new era in hadal science was developing a quixotic aspect, and, at 50, Shank could not help wondering if it was madness to spend another decade of his life on a dream that seemed to be drifting further from his reach.

Shank believes that access to the trenches will reveal one of the greatest discoveries in history: a secret ecosystem bursting with creatures that have been cloistered for eternity in the deep. While scientists struggle to reach the deep ocean, human impact has already gotten there. Most of us are familiar with the menu of damages to coastal water: overfishing, oil spills, and pollution, to name a few. What can be lost in the discussion of these issues is how they reverberate far beneath. Take fishing.

The relentless pursuit of cod in the early 20th century decimated its population from Newfoundland to New England, sending hungry shoppers in search of other options. Until the s, the slimehead fish lived in relative obscurity, patrolling the slopes of underwater mountains in water up to 6, feet deep. Environmental damage from oil production is also migrating into deeper water. Disturbing photographs of oil-drenched beaches have captured public attention since at least , when the Exxon Valdez tanker crashed into a reef and leaked 11 million gallons into an Alaskan sound. It would remain the largest spill in U.

But a recent study revealed that the release of chemicals to disperse the spill was twice as toxic as the oil to animals living 3, feet below the surface. Maybe the greatest alarm in recent years has followed the discovery of plastic floating in the ocean. Scientists estimate that 17 billion pounds of polymer are flushed into the ocean each year, and substantially more of it collects on the bottom than on the surface. Just as a bottle that falls from a picnic table will roll downhill to a gulch, trash on the seafloor gradually makes its way toward deepwater plains and hadal trenches.

After his expedition to the trenches, Victor Vescovo returned with the news that garbage had beaten him there. He found a plastic bag at the bottom of one trench, a beverage can in another, and when he reached the deepest point in the Mariana, he watched an object with a large S on the side float past his window. Trash of all sorts is collecting in the hadal—Spam tins, Budweiser cans, rubber gloves, even a mannequin head.

Scientists are just beginning to understand the impact of trash on aquatic life. When a young whale drifted ashore and died in the Philippines in , an autopsy revealed that its belly was packed with 88 pounds of plastic bags, nylon rope, and netting. Two weeks later, another whale beached in Sardinia , its stomach crammed with 48 pounds of plastic dishes and tubing.

Certain types of coral like to eat plastic more than food. They will gorge themselves like a kid on Twinkies instead of eating what they need to survive. Microbes that flourish on plastic have ballooned in number, replacing other species as their population explodes in a polymer ocean. Read: A troubling discovery in the deepest ocean trenches. If it seems trivial to worry about the population statistics of bacteria in the ocean, you may be interested to know that ocean microbes are essential to human and planetary health.

About a third of the carbon dioxide generated on land is absorbed by underwater organisms , including one species that was just discovered in the CCZ in The researchers who found that bacterium have no idea how it removes carbon from the environment, but their findings show that it may account for up to 10 percent of the volume that is sequestered by oceans every year. Many of the things we do know about ocean microbes, we know thanks to Craig Venter, the genetic scientist most famous for starting a small company in the s to compete with the Human Genome Project.

The two-year race between his company and the international collaboration generated endless headlines and culminated in a joint announcement at the White House to declare a tie. He wanted to learn the language of genetics in order to create synthetic microbes with practical features. After his work on the human genome, he spent two years sailing around the world, lowering bottles into the ocean to collect bacteria and viruses from the water.

By the time he returned, he had discovered hundreds of thousands of new species, and his lab in Maryland proceeded to sequence their DNA—identifying more than 60 million unique genes, which is about 2, times the number in humans. Then he and his team began to scour those genes for properties they could use to make custom bugs. Venter now lives in a hypermodern house on a bluff in Southern California. Chatting one evening on the sofa beside the door to his walk-in humidor and wine cellar, he described how saltwater microbes could help solve the most urgent problems of modern life.

One of the bacteria he pulled from the ocean consumes carbon and excretes methane. Venter would like to integrate its genes into organisms designed to live in smokestacks and recycle emissions. Venter was also studying bacteria that could be useful in medicine. Microbes produce a variety of antibiotic compounds, which they deploy as weapons against their rivals.

Many of those compounds can also be used to kill the pathogens that infect humans. Nearly all of the antibiotic drugs on the market were initially derived from microorganisms, but they are losing efficacy as pathogens evolve to resist them. What we need is an arsenal of new compounds. Venter pointed out that ocean microbes produce radically different compounds from those on land. We may find drugs that could be used to treat gout, or rheumatoid arthritis, or all kinds of other conditions.

Marine biologists have never conducted a comprehensive survey of microbes in the hadal trenches. The conventional tools of water sampling cannot function at extreme depth, and engineers are just beginning to develop tools that can. Microbial studies of the deepwater plains are slightly further along—and scientists have recently discovered that the CCZ is unusually flush with life. Most of those microbes, he said, live on the very same nodules that miners are planning to extract.

Coastal science and societies

Drazen is an academic ecologist; Venter is not. Venter has been accused of trying to privatize the human genome, and many of his critics believe his effort to create new organisms is akin to playing God. Mining executives insist that their work in the ocean is misunderstood. Some adopt a swaggering bravado and portray the industry as a romantic frontier adventure.

Nautilus occupies a curious place in the mining industry. It is one of the oldest companies at work on the seafloor, but also the most precarious.