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 The diamond contained a mineral called ringwoodite that entrapped
a significant amount of water, an international team of scientists
reported this week.
The discovery of the water-rich mineral indicates that mammoth
amounts of water are trapped in a zone 410 to 660 kilometers (255 to
410 miles) beneath the surface between Earth's upper and lower
mantle, the researchers said.
Ringwoodite is a form of the mineral peridot, thought to exist in
large quantities under high pressures deep underground. The mineral
was found to contain water amounting to 1.5 percent of its weight,
the scientists said.
"This sample really provides extremely strong confirmation that
there are local wet spots deep in the Earth in this area," said
University of Alberta diamond scientist Graham Pearson, who led the
research published in the journal Nature.
"That particular zone in the Earth, the transition zone, might have
as much water as all the world's oceans put together," Pearson said
in a statement.
This water is not in the form of underground liquid oceans, but
rather is locked inside minerals, the scientists said.
The diamond, formed deep underground, was discovered in 2008 in the
Juina area of Mato Grosso, Brazil, where miners retrieved it from
shallow river gravels. It had been transported to the planet's
surface by a volcanic rock known as kimberlite, the scientists said.
Ringwoodite has been seen in meteorites, but this was the first
terrestrial sample ever found, they said, because it is simply too
hard to do scientific fieldwork at extreme depths.
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There has been a debate among some scientists about the composition
of Earth's transition zone and whether it is full of water or not.
Determining that water exists there has implications for the study
of volcanism and plate tectonics, according to the researchers.
"One of the reasons the Earth is such a dynamic planet is the
presence of some water in its interior," Pearson said. "Water
changes everything about the way a planet works."
(Reporting by Will Dunham; editing by Marguerita Choy)
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