This originally appeared in the July/August issue of Discover magazine as "Oceans Beneath Oceans." Support our science journalism by becoming a subscriber.
Steven Jacobsen never planned on becoming a geophysicist. In fact, that might have been the furthest thing from his mind when he started college at the University of Colorado in the early 1990s, intent on majoring in music or business. But after he randomly chose a geology course to meet the school’s science requirement, he was inspired to follow a different path.
“After all those days of playing outside as a kid and picking up rocks,” Jacobsen says, “I realized that this is what I wanted to do.”
Now, he studies not just rocks, but the water hidden inside them. The more he and other researchers look, the more water they find all throughout Earth’s interior — even though it may not resemble the liquid we’re familiar with. ...
