Enormous Undersea Water Reservoir Unearthed – A Potential Explanation for Enigmatic Earthquakes in New Zealand

New Zealand’s Seismic Discovery: Unearthing an Ancient Aquatic Reservoir

In a groundbreaking revelation, researchers have stumbled upon a colossal underwater water reservoir concealed beneath the ocean floor near New Zealand. This astonishing discovery promises to shed light on the mechanics behind slow slip earthquakes and tectonic activities.

Slow Slip Earthquakes and the Aquatic Connection

The fault in question is notorious for generating slow-motion earthquakes, commonly referred to as “slow slip events.” These events gradually release accumulated tectonic pressure over days and weeks. Scientists have long suspected a correlation between these events and the presence of underground water. However, until now, there was no direct geological evidence to substantiate the existence of such a massive water reservoir beneath this specific New Zealand fault.

Hikurangi Plateau: A Geological Relic

The Hikurangi plateau, where this underwater water reservoir was uncovered, is a relic of a series of colossal volcanic eruptions that commenced 125 million years ago in the Pacific Ocean. The recent seismic survey conducted by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics has unveiled the plateau’s submergence into New Zealand’s Hikurangi subduction zone, marked by a red line on the map.

“We cannot yet fathom the full extent of its impact on the fault, but it’s evident that the volume of water seeping into this region exceeds normal expectations,” commented Andrew Gase, the lead author of the study and former postdoctoral fellow at UTIG.

The Quest for Deeper Insights

Andrew Gase, who now serves as a postdoctoral fellow at Western Washington University, calls for further exploration and drilling to trace the course of this water reservoir. Unraveling its journey and assessing its influence on fault pressure is a crucial piece of the puzzle that could enhance our understanding of major earthquakes.

Origins of the Water Reservoir

The water source discovered by researchers is situated within an expansive volcanic province formed when a colossal plume of lava, roughly the size of the United States, breached the Earth’s surface in the Pacific Ocean 125 million years ago. This volcanic eruption was among the most extensive in Earth’s history, persisting for several million years.

Gase employed seismic scans to construct a 3D representation of the ancient volcanic plateau. Through lab experiments on drill core samples of volcanic rock conducted by his UTIG collaborators, they found that water constituted nearly half of the rock’s volume.

Extraordinary Water Retention

Normal ocean crust, when it reaches an age of approximately 7 to 10 million years, is expected to contain significantly less water. Astonishingly, the ocean crust scanned in the seismic images was ten times older but retained much more moisture. Gase hypothesizes that the seas in which the volcanic eruptions occurred eroded some of the volcanoes, rendering the rock porous and water-logged as it sank into the Earth’s crust. Over time, this porous rock transformed into clay, effectively trapping even more water.

Implications for Earthquake Understanding

This discovery holds paramount importance as it suggests that underground water pressure may play a pivotal role in creating conditions that release tectonic stress through slow slip earthquakes. Typically, this occurs when water-rich sediments are buried alongside the fault, entailing the trapping of water underground. However, the New Zealand fault contains only minimal typical ocean sediment, leading researchers to believe that ancient volcanoes and transformed clay-rich rocks are ferrying substantial water volumes into the fault as they become engulfed by it.

Demian Saffer, coauthor of the study and co-chief scientist of the scientific drilling mission at UTIG, emphasized the broader significance of this finding. “It’s a compelling demonstration of the link between fluids and tectonic fault movement, including earthquake behavior,” he noted. “This is something we’ve conjectured through laboratory experiments and computer simulations, but there are very few field experiments of this scale within a tectonic plate.”

In conclusion, the revelation of this vast undersea water reservoir opens up new avenues of exploration and understanding in the field of seismology, offering hope for more precise earthquake predictions and preparations, not only in New Zealand but also in similar geological settings worldwide.