Humans moved the inside of the earth “to improve cotton production”

The human footprint is much larger than we thought: “kicked” even one of the largest lakes in the world and changed the internal functioning of the earth.

The upper cloak of the blue planet is slowly deforming due to the absence of the weight that was exerted by the huge water mass of the Sea of ​​aralwhich was once one of the greatest lakes in the world, before drying almost completely.

The conclusions are from a study on April 7 at Nature Geoscience, which found that large -scale drying is completely altering the depths of Eurasia’s surface.

Situated between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea was once one of the largest lakes in the world, but the Soviet era irrigation efforts They made it in the sterile and salty desert we know today.

Water from the rivers that fed the sea was diverted to the central Asian plains in the 1960s to increase the cotton productionand the lake disappeared almost completely: it lost more than 93% of its original volume.

We already knew this, but now, the team of researchers at the University of Beijing, the University of Southern Science and Technology of China and the University of Southern California found that the consequences are much more serious.

Without weight, the “mattress” returns to the place

With the help of satellite radar interferometry, the team led by Wenzhi Fan He found that the earth around the old lake is rise up to 7 millimeters per year – up to 500 kilometers beyond the original lake boundaries.

The person responsible for this phenomenon, explaining the scientists, is the viscoelastic of the earth’s cloak.

It is like a foam mattress with memory to return to its shape after we get up. When the sea of ​​Aral still existed in its entirety, it had sufficient width to exert the necessary pressure on the earth’s crust, causing the lithosphere to sink slightly into the more fluid astenosphere underneath.

Now, without the weight of the water, the earth’s surface is accompanying the race and slowly climbing – but the pace of recovery has surprised FAN’s team.

Rocha da Astenosfera, “melted, syrup“As compared to, it is flowing back to its place more dynamically than expected, at a depth of 150 kilometers below the surface-a process that can extend” for many decades, “the team writes.

“It seems that humanity has moved the tectonic plates just to improve cotton production”Simon Lamb, Scientist at the Victoria University of Wellington, New & Views.

“The desiccation of the Aral Sea has been an environmental catastrophe”, underlines the geoscientist. Given the tragedy, we can only use it “as a tool to probe the deep interior of the planet, to obtain a new view of the nature of the rocks inside and below a tectonic plate.”

Another punch we gave to the planet, without noticing our strength.