While exploring a mine they discover a well containing the oldest water on Earth

A team seven years ago Geologists They found a A lot of water when studying a mine in Canada.

This finding intrigued the researchers Old, And testing revealed he had Water is 1.5 billion to 2.64 billion years oldIt is very ancient.

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Precambrian water

The scientists published their findings in a journal Naturecharacterized water found in a mine in Timmins, Ontario Deep fracture fluids isolated from the Precambrian mine crust, That is, it is distilled water from the first and longest phase of Earth’s history.

“When people think of this water, they think it has to be a little bit of water inside the rock,” Professor Barbara Sherwood Lawler, head of the research team, told BBC News.

“But actually, it’s bubbling towards you. These things are flowing at a rate of liters per minute: the volume of water is higher than anyone expected.”

Also, there are signs of it There was life in the water hole.

“By looking at sulfate in water, we can see a fingerprint that indicates the presence of life. The signal we see in the fluids must have been produced by microbes, and more importantly, it must have been produced over a very long time. The microbes that created this signature couldn’t have done it overnight,” said Sherwood Lawler. said.

“This should be a sign that organisms existed in these fluids on a geologic time scale.”

As we know, There are organisms that can survive without lightIn this sense, microbes and small organisms use the substrates produced from the radiation and thus may have been in the cave for billions of years.

To explain how the water stayed for so many years, Long Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta, said it was maintained because of a specific reaction between the interactions in the cave. Minerals from rocks and water.

“The sulfate in this ancient water is not the modern sulfate in the surface water flowing down. “What we discovered is that sulfate, like hydrogen, is actually produced by a reaction between water and rock,” he said.

“This means that the reaction occurs naturally and lasts as long as the water and the rock interact, potentially over billions of years.”

This research gave scientists hope for discovery Life in other remote parts of the worldIt also sparked curiosity It was delicious And they tested it to the surprise of all the experts.

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

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Even if it’s not rock, the scientist said. The water tasted salty and bitterIt was saltier than the sea, which was no surprise, he assured. Old water is saltyAnd it is at least two billion years old.