The Oldest Water on Earth: A Startling Discovery in Canadian Mines

In 2016, geologists studying Canadian mines made a startling discovery. At a depth of about 3 kilometers (1.8 miles), they found flowing water, which testing showed was between 1.5 billion and 2.64 billion years old. After being isolated all this time, it is the oldest water ever found on Earth.

“When people think of this water, they assume it must be a small amount of water trapped inside the rock,” said Professor Barbara Sherwood Lawler, who led the team. BBC news. “But actually, it blows heavily on your face. This thing flows at the rate of liters per minute—it has a much larger volume of water than anyone would expect.”

The team found traces of life once in the water.

“By looking at the sulfates in the water, we can see traces that suggest the presence of life. And we can suggest that the signal we saw in the liquid must have been generated by microbiology – and more importantly, it was produced on a very long time scale,” he said. Sherwood Lawler: “The microbe that produces this signature can’t do it overnight. This should be an indication of the presence of organisms in these fluids on geological time scales.”

Without light, microbes survive use stage generated by radiation.

“Sulfate in these ancient waters is not new sulfate from surface water flowing down. What we found is that sulfate, like hydrogen, is actually produced by the interaction between water and rock,” said Long Li, assistant professor in the Earth Department. and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Michigan.Alberta, in pers conference. This means that the reaction will occur naturally and can continue as long as the water and rock are in contact, perhaps billions of years.

While this discovery has implications for finding life elsewhere on Earth as well as in the solar system, what everyone on the Internet has always wanted to know is: What does that forbidden drink taste like? Amazingly, we have an answer for that.

“If you’re a geologist working in rocks, you probably are Many stoneskata Sherwood Lawler CNN. Even though he wasn’t a rock, he could still taste water and feel it from his fingers. He was looking for a salty taste, because salt water tends to age. To his delight, the water was “very salty and bitter” and “saltier than sea water.” This isn’t entirely surprising, considering it’s over 2 billion years old.

This paper is published in alam in 2016.