A drilling expedition off Nantucket has confirmed a massive freshwater reservoir buried beneath the Atlantic seafloor — stretching from New Jersey to Maine, hypothesized since the 1960s, and holding enough drinkable water to supply New York City for rough

A drilling expedition off Nantucket has confirmed a massive freshwater reservoir buried beneath the Atlantic seafloor — stretching from New Jersey to Maine, hypothesized since the 1960s, and holding enough drinkable water to supply New York City for rough

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, oil companies conducting exploratory drilling off the East Coast of the United States occasionally produced an unexpected and somewhat inconvenient result. The drills would, on multiple occasions, return not the petroleum the companies were searching for, but freshwater. The freshwater was being found deep beneath the Atlantic seafloor, in locations that were, by every available measure of the standard hydrolog…