It’s true, but today the Czar will take a little help from our good friend and frequent Castle visitor (and more frequent plumbing jammer) Uncle Jay.

The Big Guy sends the Czar a fun little story from UK.News.Yahoo, which you can read on your own. Basically, here it is:

Earth has a secret reservoir of water, say scientists

AFP/NASA/AFP/File – This NASA image released on January 26, 2012 shows A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP

By Richard Ingham | AFP

A hundred and fifty years ago, in “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”, French science-fiction forerunner Jules Verne pictured a vast sea that lay deep under our planet’s surface.

Today, that strange and haunting image has found an unexpected echo in a scientific paper.

Writing in the journal Nature, scientists on Wednesday said they had found an elusive mineral pointing to the existence of a vast reservoir deep in Earth’s mantle, 400-600 kilometres (250-375 miles) beneath our feet.

It may hold as much water as all the planet’s oceans combined, they believe.

The evidence comes from a water-loving mineral called ringwoodite that came from the so-called transition zone sandwiched between the upper and lower layers of Earth’s mantle, they said.

Analysis shows that a whopping 1.5 percent of the rock comprises molecules of water.

The find backs once-contested theories that the transition zone, or at least significant parts of it, is water-rich, the investigators said.

“This sample really provides extremely strong confirmation that there are local wet spots deep in the Earth in this area,” said Graham Pearson of Canada’s University of Alberta, who led the research.

“That particular zone in the Earth, the transition zone, might have as much water as all the world’s oceans put together.”

Ringwoodite is named after Australian geologist Ted Ringwood, who theorised that a special mineral was bound to be created in the transition zone because of the ultra-high pressures and temperatures there.

A piece of this mineral has been a long-sought goal. It would resolve a long-running debate about whether the poorly-understood transition zone is bone-dry or water-rich.

But, until now, ringwoodite has only ever been found in meteorites. Geologists had simply been unable to delve deep enough to find any sample on Earth.

– Worthless diamond brings luck –

Good fortune, though, changed all this.

In 2008, amateur gem-hunters digging in shallow river gravel in the Juina area of Mato Grasso, Brazil, came across a tiny, grubby stone called a brown diamond.

Measuring just three millimetres (0.12 inches) across and commercially worthless, the stone was acquired by the scientists when they were on a quest for other minerals.

But the accidental acquisition turned out to be a bonanza.

In its interior, they found a microscopic trace of ringwoodite — the very first terrestrial evidence of the ultra-rare rock.

“It’s so small, this inclusion, it’s extremely difficult to find, never mind work on,” Pearson said in a press release, paying tribute to the diligent work of grad student John McNeill.

“It was a bit of a piece of luck, this discovery, as are many scientific discoveries.”

The team theorise that the brown diamond rocketed to the surface during a volcanic eruption, hitchhiking in a stream of kimberlite, the deepest of all volcanic rocks.

Years of analysis, using spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction, were needed in specialised labs to confirm the find officially as ringwoodite.

Scientists have debated for decades about whether the transition zone has water, and if so, how much of the precious stuff there might be.

None, though, has embraced Verne’s fancy of a subterranean sea with a rocky coastline dotted with forests of giant mushrooms and petrified trees.

Hans Keppler, a geologist at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, cautioned against extrapolating the size of the subterranean water find from a single sample of ringwoodite.

And he also said the water was likely to be locked up in specific rocks, in a molecular form called hydroxyl.

“In some ways it is an ocean in Earth’s interior, as visualised by Jules Verne… although not in the form of liquid water,” Keppler said in a commentary also published by Nature.

The implications of the discovery are profound, Pearson suggested.

If water exists in huge volumes beneath Earth’s crust, it is bound to have a big impact on the mechanics of volcanoes and the movement of tectonic plates.

“One of the reasons the Earth is such a dynamic planet is the presence of some water in its interior. Water changes everything about the way a planet works,” said Pearson.

Ready? Let us rewrite the entire story, taking it to a less mainstream level:

Scientist finds possibility of subsurface moisture

A picture of the earth, where much of this story takes place. We put this here in the event you cannot figure this out from the obvious clues that follow.

By Richard Ingham (as he may have originally wrote it before it was destroyed by ignorance from an editor at) | AFP

A hundred and fifty years ago, Jules Verne wrote a piece of colorful fantasy that imagined an entire sea hundreds of feet below the surface the earth. This of course has nothing to do with a research paper about subsurface moisture, but we in the media believe no one will read a story about a discovery unless we link it to really old popular culture. Oddly, we could have used a picture of Brendan Fraser, but it turns out no one saw that movie.

Anyway, a scientist—maybe two, so we always say scientists to make it sound like this has universal consensus—has found traces of a mineral called ringwoodite on a diamond. Ringwoodite isn’t well known because it is usually found only on meteorites.

However, the fact this was observed on a diamond suggests that maybe, somehow, ringwoodite formed naturally with the diamond. And that’s newsworthy because this possibility was predicted by Australian geologist Ted Ringwood: he theorized that subsurface moisture could be squeezed by massive internal pressures to create this rare mineral. The existence of ringwoodite on this diamond suggests that the process is indeed possible, although it may have formed in other ways we haven’t figured out yet.

Assuming that this ringwoodite formed naturally, we are inclined to wonder how much water could be below the deep surface of the earth. If indeed this is common—and we don’t know that because we found only one piece of it—then there could be more subsurface moisture below the earth than thought. Indeed, the volume of the earth is large enough that, in the area where ringwoodite would form, there could be more water molecules there than in all the earth’s oceans combined.

Of course, we don’t know for sure this ringwoodite formed naturally, and we don’t even know what depth it formed. All we have is one small piece, but geologists are excited over the probability it formed naturally. Because it forms at such intense depths, we cannot easily find more of it to verify. So we can’t really guess as to how much water there is, yet.

That’s why this is such an exciting discovery to geologists, but perhaps not so much to you.

Well, that’s how the story should read at any rate. Not so sexy.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.