{"id":217605,"date":"2025-07-11T05:12:16","date_gmt":"2025-07-11T10:12:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/this-mineral-could-hold-the-key-to-earths-hidden-ocean"},"modified":"2025-07-11T05:12:16","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T10:12:16","slug":"this-mineral-could-hold-the-key-to-earths-hidden-ocean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/this-mineral-could-hold-the-key-to-earths-hidden-ocean","title":{"rendered":"This Mineral Could Hold the Key to Earth\u2019s Hidden Ocean"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/this-mineral-could-hold-the-key-to-earths-hidden-ocean.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>New research reveals that only the oldest and fastest-sinking oceanic plates can transport water deep into Earth\u2019s mantle, due to the unique heat-transferring properties of the mineral olivine.<\/p>\n<p>Because of the way the mineral olivine conducts heat through radiation, only oceanic tectonic plates that are more than 60 million years old and moving downward at speeds greater than 10 centimeters per year are able to stay cool enough to carry water deep into the Earth\u2019s mantle.<\/p>\n<p>This conclusion comes from a team of researchers at the University of Potsdam and the Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) Potsdam, along with international partners. They reached this finding after measuring how transparent olivine is to infrared light under the extreme pressure and temperature conditions found within the Earth\u2019s mantle. Their study was published in Nature Communications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New research reveals that only the oldest and fastest-sinking oceanic plates can transport water deep into Earth\u2019s mantle, due to the unique heat-transferring properties of the mineral olivine. Because of the way the mineral olivine conducts heat through radiation, only oceanic tectonic plates that are more than 60 million years old and moving downward at [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}