They discover a well with the oldest water on Earth when exploring a mine

Seven years ago it was a group of geologists discover a Large amounts of water while studying a mine in Canada.

This discovery impressed researchers with it Antiquity, Which is that tests revealed he had The waters ranged from 1.5 billion to 2.64 billion years oldmaking it the oldest known.

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Water from the Precambrian

Scientists who published their findings in the journal natureThe water at the Timmins Mine, Ontario, is classified as Isolated deep fracture fluids in the mine crust from the Precambrian era, This means that it was purified from water dating back to the first and longest phase in Earth’s history.

Lead researcher Professor Barbara Sherwood Lawler told BBC News: “When people think of this water, they assume it must be a small amount of water trapped inside the rock.”

“But really, it’s coming towards you. This stuff is flowing at a rate of liters per minute: the volume of water is much more than anyone would have expected.”

Moreover, there are indications for this There was life inside the well.

“Looking at the sulfates in the water, we can see an imprint that indicates the presence of life. And we were able to suggest that the signal we see in the fluids must have been caused by microbiology, and more importantly, it must have been produced on a very long time scale.” The microbes that produced this signature couldn’t do it overnight,” Sherwood Lawler said.

“This should be an indication that organisms have been present in these fluids on a geological time scale.”

as we know, There are organisms that can survive without lightIn this sense, microbes and microorganisms used radiation-generated substrates, and thus could exist for billions of years in the cave.

To explain how this water was able to survive for so many years, Long Li, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta, said it was preserved thanks to a certain interaction that occurred in the cave between contact between minerals from rocks and water.

“The sulfates in these ancient waters are not the modern sulfates in the surface water flowing downstream. What we found is that sulfates, like hydrogen, are actually produced by the interaction between water and rock.”

“What this means is that the reaction will occur naturally and can continue as long as water and rock are in contact, possibly for billions of years.”

This search gave scientists hope to find them life in other remote parts of the worldalso aroused a curiosity for knowledge What does it taste like And to the surprise of all the experts who tested it.

“If you’re a geologist who works with rocks, you probably licked a lot of rocks,” Sherwood Lawlar told CNN.

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The scientist said that although it was not a rock, The water tastes salty and bitterwas saltier than the sea, which is not surprising, he asserted, since Older water tends to be saltierthat is at least two billion years.