Miners discovered world's oldest known water in ancient pool
Gerrard Kaonga
Featured Image Credit: University of Toronto / Ingenium
When you wager a guess as to where the oldest water of planet Earth might be, you may understandably think at the bottom of the ocean somewhere. But I'm sorry to say you are way off.
If you guessed at the bottom of a Canadian mine, two points to you.
The water has been trapped in the rocks of Ontario’s Kidd Creek Mine and has sparked interest from scientists the world over.
The Canadian mine has been of interest as it is the deepest basal metal mine in the world. This mine has allowed miners to find precious metals like copper, silver and zinc, as they dig deeper into the Earth’s crust.
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The discovery of this ancient water was by geochemist Barbara Sherwood Lollar, who had been visiting the mine since 1992.
During a 2013 expedition with a team from the University of Toronto, she made her way almost 2.4 kilometers underground inside a cavern flooded with flowing water.
The most interesting thing that hit them first was the smell of sulfate, as well as the fact the water was flowing, bubbling out of fractures in the rock.
After miners found the water deep underground, scientists analyzed the liquid, studying how gases such as helium and xenon can get trapped in water stuck in rock cracks to determine how old it was.
“It literally is following your nose right up to the rock, to find the crack or the fractures where the water is discharging,” Sherwood Lollar told the Maclean’s publication.
Also speaking to the BBC in 2016, she said: “When people think about this water they assume it must be some tiny amount of water trapped within the rock.
"But in fact it’s very much bubbling right up out at you. These things are flowing at rates of liters per minute - the volume of the water is much larger than anyone anticipated."
The ancient body of water is estimated to be around 1.6 billion years old.
The discovery was not the only bit of history that the researchers discovered while mining the cave.
In fact, it also provided a unique insight into the history of our planet, and the type of organisms that could be found at that time.
Researchers found chemical traces left behind by single-celled organisms that once lived in the fluid.
Prof Sherwood Lollar told the BBC: "By looking at the sulphate in the water, we were able to see a fingerprint that’s indicative of the presence of life.
"And we were able to indicate that the signal we are seeing in the fluids has to have been produced by microbiology - and most importantly has to have been produced over a very long-time scale.
"This has to be an indication that organisms have been present in these fluids on a geological timescale."