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Water covers nearly three-quarters of Earth's surface. But how much water lies hidden underground in the planet's crust ? A 2021 study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that more of Earth's water is held underground in the soil or in pores in rock — known as groundwater — than in Earth's ice caps and glaciers. "There are approximately 43.9 million cubic kilometers [10.5 million cubic miles] of water in the Earth's crust," Grant Ferguson , a hydrogeologist at the University of Saskatchewan and lead author of the 2021 study, told Live Science. Related: How much water is in Earth's atmosphere? In comparison, ice in Antarctica holds about 6.5 million cubic miles (27 million cubic km) of water; in Greenland , about 720,000 cubic miles (3 million cubic km); and in glaciers outside of Antarctica and Greenland, 38,000 cubic miles (158,000 cubic km), the 2021 study noted. Earth's oceans remain the planet's largest reservoir of w...

A hazardous fault line that runs south of downtown Seattle may have formed when the edge of the North American continent tore apart 55 million years ago, a new study suggests. Seattle sits atop the Cascadia Subduction Zone , where the Explorer, Juan de Fuca and Gorda tectonic plates slide beneath the much larger North American Plate. This eastward movement pulled a string of volcanic islands similar to present-day Iceland toward the continent and eventually caused a collision that's still visible in the bedrock beneath the city. New maps of this bedrock reveal the collision was extremely messy, with the northern half of the island chain riding the oceanic crust and slipping under the continent and the southern half piling onto the continent. The twist in Earth's crust where the islands switched from being subducted to obducted, or added to the top of the continent, would have been under tremendous strain and likely ripped in half. "It would have been this slow, ongoi...