The undersea river, which is 35 meters in depth, 800 meters in width and 37 kilometers in length, stems from salty water spilling through the Bosporus Strait from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea. If found on land, the undersea river would be the world’s sixth largest river in terms of the amount of water flowing through it, according to a report published on Monday by the British daily the Telegraph.Dr. Dan Parsons from the University of Leeds in England, who discovered the undersea river with his colleagues, stated that the water in the channel has high salinity and carries much sediment, making it denser than the surrounding seawater. The researchers used a robotic submarine to study a deep channel that had been found on the seabed. They discovered a river of highly salty water flowing along the deep channel at the bottom of the Black Sea, creating riverbanks and flood plains much like a river found on land.
“It flows down the sea shelf and out into the abyssal plain much like a river on land. The abyssal plains of our oceans are like the deserts of the marine world, but these channels can deliver nutrients and ingredients needed for life out over these deserts. This means they could be vitally important, like arteries providing life to the deep ocean,” Parsons pointed out. He underlined that the key difference they found from terrestrial rivers was that as the flow goes around a bend, the water spirals in the opposite way to rivers on land.
Parsons discovered that the Black Sea river is flowing at around four miles per hour with 22,000 cubic meters of water passing through the channel every second -- 10 times greater than Europe’s biggest river, the Rhine.
It is believed that this research will offer many scientists the opportunity to study other deep seas.
