A Bit More Detail

An international research team reported Wednesday that miners near Timmins are tapping into an ancient underground oasis that may harbour prehistoric microbes. The water flowing out of fractures and bore holes in one mine near Timmins dates back more than a billion years, perhaps 2.6 billion, making it the oldest water known to exist on Earth, says the team that details the discovery in the journal Nature.

“This is the oldest (water) anybody has been able to pull out, and quite frankly, it changes the playing field,” says geologist Barbara Sherwood Lollar, at the University of Toronto, who co-led the team.

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Analyses of isotopes of the compounds and gases in the samples revealed the salty water, which sparkles as ancient gas bubbles out of it, has been trapped in the rocks between 1.5 and 2.64 billion years. The water also contains plenty of hydrogen, comparable to rates found on hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean, which can fuel microbial life.

The rocks in the mines near Timmins were created by a massive hydrothermal vent system on an ancient seafloor 2.7 billion years ago. Volcanic lava and sea sediments are stacked up in the rocks like a “layer cake,” says Sherwood Lollar. “When you go down in the mines you can see some of the pillow lavas structures still preserved in the rock.”

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