Deep in Earth's past, an icy landscape became a seascape as the ice melted and the oceans rose off what is now the northeastern United States. Nearly 50 years ago, a US government ship searching for minerals and hydrocarbons in the area drilled into the seafloor to see what it could find. It found, of all things, drops to drink under the briny deeps—fresh water. This summer, a first-of-its-kind global research expedition followed up on that surprise. Drilling for fresh water under the salt water off Cape Cod, Expedition 501 extracted thousands of samples from what is now thought to be a massive, hidden aquifer stretching from New Jersey as far north as Maine, the AP reports.
It's just one of many depositories of "secret fresh water" known to exist in shallow salt waters around the world that might some day be tapped to slake the planet's intensifying thirst, says Brandon Dugan, the expedition's co-chief scientist. In just five years, the UN says, the global demand for fresh water will exceed supplies by 40%. "We need to look for every possibility we have to find more water for society," says Dugan, a geophysicist and hydrologist at the Colorado School of Mines. They found it, and will be analyzing nearly 13,209 gallons of it back in their labs around the world in the coming months. They're out to solve the mystery of its origins—whether the water is from glaciers, connected groundwater systems on land, or some combination.
- The potential is enormous. So are the hurdles of getting the water out and puzzling over who owns it, who uses it and how to extract it without undue harm to nature. It's bound to take years to bring that water ashore for public use in a big way, if it's even feasible.
- Enter Expedition 501 is a $25 million scientific collaboration of more than a dozen countries backed by the US government's National Science Foundation and the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling. Scientists went into the project believing the undersea aquifer they were sampling might be sufficient to meet the needs of a metropolis the size of New York City for 800 years. They found fresh or nearly fresh water at both higher and lower depths below the seafloor than they anticipated, suggesting a larger supply even than that.
- Expedition 501 was quite literally groundbreaking—it penetrated Earth below the sea by as much as 1,289 feet, moving from site to site 20 to 30 miles off the coast.
- In months of analysis ahead, the scientists will investigate a range of properties of the water, including what microbes were living in the depths, what they used for nutrients and energy sources and what byproducts they might generate; in other words, whether the water is safe to consume or otherwise use.
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- "This is a new environment that has never been studied before," says Jocelyne DiRuggiero, a Johns Hopkins University biologist in Baltimore who studies the microbial ecology of extreme environments. "The water may contain minerals detrimental to human health since it percolated through layers of sediments," she said. "However, a similar process forms the terrestrial aquifers that we use for freshwater, and those typically have very high quality."
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