Coleridge once wisely wrote:
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink
The last place you'd expect to find drinkable water is, you know, underneath the extremely salty ocean. But that's apparently what scientists have done.
Via SciTechDaily:
A team drilled offshore Nantucket and recovered cores with water near drinking quality. ...
How did freshened water come to be trapped beneath the New England Shelf, how long has it remained there, and what volume does it represent?
I'll be honest with you, I wasn't even aware that there was, you know, water underneath ocean water! That's all news to me. And apparently it can be "near drinking quality?"
Evidently the scientists were equally surprised. The "salinity levels of sediments below the seafloor are typically close to those in the overlying ocean," which is unsurprising. But "offshore New England, the subseafloor contains an unusually large reservoir of freshened water."
"Freshened water," according to Wikipedia, is "water that contains [salt] concentration lower than sea water, and which is hosted in porous sediments and rocks located in the sub-seafloor." So it's not unknown to scientists. But the quality of the stuff off the coast of Nantucket was surprising:
'The sheer freshness of the water, which was close to drinking water limits, was a surprise to me,' said [lead scientist Rebecca] Robinson. 'I didn't think freshened meant to the level of oceanic salinities, but I also didn't think it would be so close to what we get out of the taps.'
"So close to what we get out of the taps," of course, means it's still not drinkable. So if you find any freshened groundwater near Nantucket, don't drink it!
The whole endeavor was a technical feat: Scientists deployed "a 185-foot liftboat fitted with a compact drilling rig ... used to extract 50,000 liters of water from multiple subseafloor depths."
They plan to study the water to learn its origins, in part by using an "isotope ratio mass spectrometer."
Very cool!
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