Starship Asterisk*

Is it just me or is the media getting the entirely wrong point out of this finding?
http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/ ... 140612.htm

I've read everything from legitimate news articles stating that it could become a source of fresh water for future humans to predictable comments about this being where Noah's great flood waters came from. I've also read articles writing about it like this: It's not a gas, liquid, or solid! It's in another state of matter. Oh, please. I guess it's not plasma, either, or they would have said that. Nope, this fourth state is being called "molecular" which I can only take to mean that its molecules are separated by such distance that it's kind of like saying there's a lake of gold within the Atlantic ocean if only we could pick all of the atoms up and put them back together again. People are super confused about this. Reading the headlines you'd think there is a literal ocean 400 miles underground and all we have to do is stick a pipe in and have it rush out.

Original paper is here, but I can't read anything but the abstract, which by itself is a far cry away from anything most media are reporting.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6189/1265

geckzilla wrote:Is it just me or is the media getting the entirely wrong point out of this finding?

It's not just you. It's been understood for a long time that a large amount of water is stored in the form of mineral hydrates. Very useful in terms of understanding geology, and of no use at all in terms of providing water to humans.

This new report is interesting in the way it provides detail about part of the mantle, it's interesting because the presence of water can explain many observations, and it's abstractly interesting to think how many H₂O molecules are not actually in oceans (which we think of as representing 97% of all the water, but which apparently represents well less than half).

The fact that there is an ocean's worth of water in the mantle isn't at all the same as what so many stories are reporting, that there's an actual ocean down there.

Bottom line: If no one can swim in it, it's not an ocean, so stop calling it that. There's got to be a better way to present a headline that's not misleading. How would the mantle function if there was no water in it? Would it be very different? Is the water to thank for some of the most dangerous volcanic eruptions? There are some cool questions to ask that never got touched for this.