Phillip Ross
8 Dec 2013
The last place you might expect to find drinkable water is underneath the ocean. But that’s exactly where scientists have discovered a number of vast, untapped reservoirs of freshwater.
While exploring the ocean floor for pockets of oil and gas, scientists inadvertently came across evidence of massive aquifers sitting right below the ocean floor. According to the new study, published Dec. 5 in the journal Nature, the freshwater is located in continental shelves near Australia, China, North America and South Africa. Researchers estimate there is 500,000 cubic kilometers, or about 120,000 cubic miles, of low-salinity water holed up in seafloor reservoirs.
“The volume of this water resource is a hundred times greater than the amount we’ve extracted from the Earth’s sub-surface in the past century since 1900,” Vincent Post, a groundwater hydro geologist from Flinders University in Australia and the lead author of the study, said in a statement.
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