{"id":98734,"date":"2025-08-26T16:57:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T16:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/98734\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T16:57:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T16:57:10","slug":"worlds-oldest-water-is-1-6-billion-years-old-and-this-scientist-tasted-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/98734\/","title":{"rendered":"World’s Oldest Water is 1.6 billion Years Old — and This Scientist Tasted It"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the deep recesses of a Canadian mine, geochemist Barbara Sherwood Lollar<\/a> stumbled upon the find of a lifetime: water that\u2019s astonishingly over 1.6 billion years old. This ancient liquid has been trapped between the rocks of Ontario\u2019s Kidd Creek Mine for all this time, making it the world\u2019s oldest water by a long shot. <\/p>\n

Moreover, scientists also found microbes that have grown in isolation for all this time, hinting at the possibility of alien life in similar caverns well beneath the surface of other worlds in the solar system.<\/p>\n

A liquid time capsule<\/p>\n

\"A <\/a>A water sample from the mine. Credit: Canada Science and Technology Museum.<\/p>\n

Sherwood Lollar first visited Kidd Creek mine in 1992. With sections more than 3 kilometers deep, Kidd Creek is the world\u2019s deepest metal mine, making it the ideal spot to sample ancient water<\/a>. However, it would take another three decades before Sherwood Lollard and colleagues could reach a section deep enough to extract the record-setting brine. <\/p>\n

During a 2013 expedition, the team from the University of Toronto finally made their way nearly 2.4 kilometers underground inside a cavern flooded with flowing water. The water bubbles out of fractures in the rock or from boreholes that intersect with the fractures.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen people think about this water they assume it must be some tiny amount of water trapped within the rock,\u201d said Prof Sherwood Lollar.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut in fact it\u2019s very much bubbling right up out at you. These things are flowing at rates of liters per minute \u2013 the volume of the water is much larger than anyone anticipated.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first thing that hit them was the musty smell of sulfate. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt literally is following your nose right up to the rock, to find the crack or the fractures where the water is discharging,\u201d Sherwood Lollar told Maclean\u2019s<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The highly saline fluid \u2014 which turned out to be 10 times saltier than seawater \u2014 is rich in sulfate, a fingerprint of microbial life. But the real surprise came after they received their lab tests for dating the water. This dating involves sampling ancient gases like helium, neon, argon, and xenon still trapped inside the water, whose isotopes decay at a predictable rate.<\/p>\n

\"Gas <\/a>Gas bubbles out of the floor of a deep mine in Canada, containing ingredients that could sustain life. Credit: J. Telling. <\/p>\n

Sherwood Lollar knew something was strange when she didn\u2019t get the lab tests in time. When she phoned a British researcher in charge of the dating, she was informed that it might take a while. The lab\u2019s mass spectrometer must be broken, the person at the other end told her, since the measurements were clearly wrong. Except they weren\u2019t. <\/p>\n

The lab equipment wasn\u2019t faulty. The 1.6 billion-year-old result<\/a> that came back was genuine, a good 500 million years older than the previous record-holding oldest water. <\/p>\n

\"Barbara <\/a>Barbara Sherwood Lollar. Credit: Perry King, University of Toronto. <\/p>\n

Beyond Earth <\/p>\n

\"Scientists <\/a>Scientists sample briny water from deep down a Canadian metal mine. Credit: University of Toronto.<\/p>\n

After some digging around, they also found evidence of life: tiny chemolithotrophic microbes within the water that survive by consuming hydrogen and sulfate. Inside the ancient cavern exposed by the mining operation, the chemistry that produced the sulfate is very similar to mineral-rich hydrothermal vents found on the ocean floor. Many scientists believe hydrothermal vents are some of the best candidates for the origin of life<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost life lives on sunlight, but these deep subsurface microbes seem to live on the limited energy they can only get inside the water trapped in these ancient rocks, \u201d says Long Li, assistant professor at the University of Alberta\u2019s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.<\/p>\n

In fact, the Kidd Creek Mine sits on top of the Precambrian Canadian Shield, dating back 2.7 billion years. It was once an ocean floor. Because oceanic crust is constantly being recycled by plate tectonics, the oldest existing ocean floor dates back to only a few hundred million years. So the Canadian cavern not only provides a time capsule for billion-year-old water, but also offers a glimpse of Earth\u2019s ancient seabed.<\/p>\n

And finding energy-rich waters so deep underground alludes to an entirely different class of life found miles beneath the crust. This means there\u2019s a non-zero chance life could be present beneath Mars\u2019 surface<\/a>. Once a rich ocean world like Earth, Mars is now barren and dry \u2014 but its subterranean environment could look entirely different.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe no longer think of life on Earth as this smear of biology on the surface. Life may be something that deeply permeates our planet,\u201d Sherwood Lollar said. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s all super fascinating, but I think all this talk of water has made y\u2019all thirsty to learn the answer to the question that\u2019s on everybody\u2019s mind right now: What does billion-year-old water taste like? <\/p>\n

Being a geologist, Sherwood Lollar has licked a lot of rocks throughout her career. This expedition was no different, and she even tasted some of the ancient water off her finger. It\u2019s \u201cvery salty and bitter\u201d, she told CNN<\/a> in an interview. It didn\u2019t exactly age like wine, that\u2019s for sure. <\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in 2023 and was updated with new information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the deep recesses of a Canadian mine, geochemist Barbara Sherwood Lollar stumbled upon the find of a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98735,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[57363,49,48,57364,66,11547],"class_list":["post-98734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-brine","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-isotopes","tag-science","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}