Science
1Â hour, 35Â minutes
It has recently come to light that a geologist in Canada has discovered what might just be the oldest water on Earth. The water sample was collected from a mine in Ontario and has been analyzed by geochemists at the University of Oxford.
As
reported by Macleanâs, the geochemist named Barbara Sherwood Lollar sent water samples for testing to a colleague at the University of Oxford. She discovered the water sample while visiting the Glencore-owned Kidd Creek mine. Lollar first went on an expedition to the Kidd Creek back in 1992 and 17 years later, Lollar along with her team extracted whatâs being reported as the Earthâs oldest water from 2.4 kilometres underground.
This geologist found the oldest water on earth in a Canadian mine
The billion-year-old water might help unlock one of humanity s biggest unanswered questions: Could there be life on other planets?
April 27, 2021 NASA’s Jesse Tarnas visited Kidd Creek to learn what its deep fluids can tell us about life on Mars (Courtesy of Stable Isotope Lab/University of Toronto)
When Barbara Sherwood Lollar sent water samples to a colleague at the University of Oxford for testing, she knew this was no ordinary water. The geochemist had spent much of her career wandering around some of the deepest mines in the world, finding and extracting water that was millions of years old. She waited and waited for results that should’ve come back promptly. So she dialled up the U.K. researcher in charge of the test. “I said, ‘Hey, what’s going on with the samples?’ ” she recalls. “He said, ‘Our mass spectrometer is broken. This can’t be right.’ ” The tests pegged the mean age of th