I was on a hike and read a plaque that said this area used to be completely covered by water. My question is, where did all that water go? Just absorbed into the ground? Evaporated?
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Lots of different things OP.
Water could’ve gone underground, it also could’ve been absorbed in some extent by the biosphere (trees, plants, etc). Water inside of you means water that isn’t on the ground after all. You could also have water that’s in the air, climate change is infamous for increasing global temperatures and hotter air holds more water in it.
Also glaciers! Yeah a whole lot of places it could be
It’s not the water that changed but the geology.
Duo to the movement of continental plates, some parts of the planet were once ocean floor but have been pushed above water.
>I was on a hike and read a plaque that said this area used to be completely covered by water. My question is, where did all that water go? Just absorbed into the ground? Evaporated?
It would have been absorbed into the ground and/or tied up in glaciers and polar ice caps.
Depends on what area you were at precisely, but the water most likely didn’t go anywhere, it’s the ground that moved. Some areas the ground is lifting up, the others it’s sinking, Earth isn’t so rock solid over geological timeframes.
Once upon a time there was an ocean (or maybe a sea, or a lake?). Over time, sediment (sand and silt) settled on the bottom of that ocean. Eventually that sediment was buried so deeply, and was under so much pressure and heat that it became rock.
While this was happening, the continents slowly drifted, and in some places, this caused the rock to be pushed upwards, until it was no longer under water.
So the water didn’t go anywhere. the sea-bed was lifted up until it was above water.
If all ice on Earth melted the global sea level would rise approximately 70 meters (approximately 230 feet).
That’s a lot of water. There have been periods in the past when the water level was much different compared to today.
Another thing is that geography changes over time. How high above the see level something is today doesn’t mean it wasn’t under water at some point.
This depends a lot on where you are, but in certain parts of the world the ice sheet during last ice age was several kilometers thick. All that mass of ice pushed ground down, over a kilometer in some places. After the ice age, the ground begun to rebounce, and it’s still raising to this day.
If there were no mountains, valleys, hills or changes in elevation at all. If the entire crust was a perfect sphere, there would be enough water to cover it 1.68 miles deep. Even if you only include the oceans, it’s still 1.62 to 1.63 miles deep. So we’re very lucky that tectonic activity changes the landscape. Fissures can create volcanos, plates crashing into each other push up mountains, both will push water out of the way as they rise.
It also depends on how long ago we’re talking. If it’s Pangaea, that’s only like, a couple hundred million years ago. The atmosphere and climate aren’t going to be insanely far off from what they are right now, but a couple billion years ago, we’re talking proto-Earth where weather would have been unrecognizable. It started off super hot so there would have been an insane amount of water evaporated in the atmosphere. As it cooled down, that rain likely lasted for centuries. There would have been phenomenal flooding. Once the rains finally ceased, a more stable equilibrium could be found where evaporation rate more closely matches rain
Ice age took water that used to be in oceans and put it on land. When ice melted, it made big lakes but then the water made its way back to the oceans by evaporating and rivers and such. Some water is still in ice in things like ice caps and glaciers but that is likely to at least partly melt due to human activity, meaning oceans will get higher and flood some of the land again. Some of it is also land that used to be squished under ice rising a bit now that the ice is off. It was a lot of ice.
Looking back further, the earth’s plates move around and you get stuff going up or down slowly over time. There are sea fossils on top of Everest from when it was underwater.
>I was on a hike and read a plaque that said this area used to be completely covered by water. My question is, where did all that water go? Just absorbed into the ground? Evaporated?
It would have been absorbed into the ground and/or tied up in glaciers and polar ice caps.
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