It may sound like an oxymoron — or perhaps a fictional plotline to a Beatles movie — but it’s true: a yellow submarine sent by a team of English scientists has discovered a 37-mile mystifying underwater river with waterfalls and rapids at the bottom of the Black Sea.
I know, weird, right? But sometimes with science, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Since the 1970s, when sonar technology first allowed detailed 3-D maps of the ocean floor, scientists have suspected that there were underwater channels eroding the seabeds. But, it wasn’t until researchers from Britain’s University of Leeds, as well as Memorial University in Canada and the Institute of Marine Science in Turkey, sent a sunshine yellow robotic sub with an underwater camera and a gauge to measure water density that a river system beneath the Black Sea was confirmed.
It is 3,170 feet wide in some places and has banks up to 82 feet high and, if it were above ground, would be the world’s sixth largest river. Researchers believe it started to form at the end of the last ice age — about 8,000 years ago. The result is that salty water from the Mediterranean is spilling into the Black Sea at the Bosphorus Strait.
“The Mediterranean-derived water flows as a result of gravity, acting on the density difference that’s produced by higher concentrations of salt,” says Dan Parsons, a research fellow at Leeds’ School of Earth and Environment. “It’s essentially the same process that takes place when you pour bubble bath into water and it sinks and flows along the bottom of the tub toward the plug hole.”
Photo by DirectDish via Flickr.