In 2016, geologists studying a Canadian mine made a startling discovery. At a depth of about 3 kilometers (1.8 miles), they found flowing water, which tests revealed to be between 1.5 billion and 2.64 billion years old. Having been 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 tiny amount of water trapped inside the rock,” said Professor Barbara Sherwood Lawler, who led the team. BBC News. “But actually, it blows a lot in your face. This stuff is flowing at a rate of liters per minute—the volume of water is much more than anyone expected.”
The team found traces of life once in the water.
“By looking at the sulfates in the water, we were able to see an imprint that indicated the presence of life. And we were able to suggest that the signal we see in the fluids must have been produced by microbiology – and more importantly, it was produced on a very long time scale,” he said. Sherwood Lawler: “The microbes that produced this signature couldn’t do it overnight. This should be an indication of the presence of organisms in these fluids on a geological time scale.”
Without light, the microbes survived using stilts produced by radiation.
“The sulfates in these ancient waters are not recent sulfates from surface water flowing downward. What we found is that sulfates, like hydrogen, are actually produced by the interaction between water and rock,” said Long Li, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Michigan. Alberta, in press release. “What this means is that the reaction will occur naturally and can continue as long as water and rock are in contact, possibly billions of years.”
While this discovery had implications for finding life elsewhere on Earth as well as out there in the solar system, what everyone on the Internet has always wanted to know is: What does the forbidden drink taste like? Amazingly, we have an answer for that.
“If you’re a geologist who works in rocks, you probably are Lots of rocksSherwood Lawler said CNN. Even though she’s not a rock, she still gets to sample the water and taste it from her finger. She was looking for a salty taste, as saltwater tends to age. To her delight, the water was “very salty and bitter” and “salter than sea water”. This isn’t entirely surprising, given that it was over 2 billion years old.
The paper was published in nature in 2016.
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