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Water Isolated for Over a Billion Years Found Under Ontario
ananyo writes "Scientists working 2.4 kilometers below Earth's surface in a Canadian mine have tapped a source of water that has remained isolated for at least a billion years. The researchers say they do not yet know whether anything has been living in it all this time, but the water contains high levels of methane and hydrogen — the right stuff to support life. Micrometer-scale pockets in minerals billions of years old can hold water that was trapped during the minerals' formation. But no source of free-flowing water passing through interconnected cracks or pores in Earth's crust has previously been shown to have stayed isolated for more than tens of millions of years (paper abstract)."
If you need me, I will be in my hermetically sealed Doomsday Bunker, just in case a vicious and contagious disease emerges.
sudo make me a sandwich
Bottle it.
Then sell it at $50 a pop with dubious claims about health benefits.
"Billioneia Aquifer" - You can taste the years.
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
You know, to further reasearch.
Where they there to see it trapped? Then how do they know!?
There is water at the bottom of the ocean!
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
I find it hard to believe that Ontario has been so geologically inactive as to leave this water undisturbed for the last billion years.
God put it there to rattle our belief..
Isn't this the plot to those Piranha movies?
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is said to have been disappointed with the find, but he is confident that continued efforts will eventually locate valuable stores of oil and coal ...
Amazing - the water was put there the last time the Leafs won the Stanley Cup!
cue Ragnarok and Wagnerian music..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rmungandr
Imagine how much more untapped water reserves there might be...DRILL BABY DRILL!!!
The Silurians are going to be pissed.
Seriously, this is just a science-fiction disaster waiting to happen.
I, for one, welcome our new "Thing" overlords.
Generally parasites co-evolve with their hosts. Because of this, it is actually fairly unlikely to unearth some vicious ancient virus from waters a billion years old. Billions of years ago all that existed was bacteria and the oldest viruses we know about go back only hundreds of millions of years.
That said I fully endorse your Hermetic seal and wish you well in your initiating our flippered friends into the alchemic ways.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
A writer is creating the script for the next so-horrible-it's-funny SyFy movie.
This is amazing. 1 billion year old mineral water and it's still fizzy!
Smivs on the intertubes!
It would be cool if an explorer became the first human ever attacked by a live anomalocaris. Oh the movies & games it would spawn...
Table-ized A.I.
How exactly is the time calculated? Does anyone know? I mean I have heard of several methods, from carbon dating to a few others, however this one is a bit exotic. It is not explained in either the article nor the paper, but only references another paper as which title seems to say potential method, which doesn't sound awfully conclusive.
They mention the encapsulating rock formations are billions of years old, and I can get behind that analysis, but it is my understanding that you can find billion year old rock in a lot of places. How does one date water? How do you know that it has been trapped all that time, and not captured at some point through various geological processes.
The paper references the African goldmine, but they used microbes, which I have to believe they haven't found yet. Something to do with levels of Xenon seems to be indicator, but what does that mean?
Anyway I remain skeptical until I see the details... however the only problem admittedly is the details might be beyond my level of comprehension... Still it would be nice to know and at least attempt to explain how this is possible.
You probably thought I was going to ask if it ran Linux, didn't you?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
which you faithless cannot understand
So, the predominant theory seems to be that the water on Earth came from comets raining down in mass quantities in the early days of the Earth. The samples of this old water source shows a high amount of hydrogen. Could the water here have come from our planet having a lot of H2 that burned/reacted with the O2 we had, creating all our water, instead of being delivered here from the sky?
today is spelling optional day.
Why in the world does anyone think that all the water on the earth had to arrive there by a single delivery mechanism?
Some water was present during initial formation, some water crashed on to the surface later on than that.
Actually, this article lists five different sources of water, with no reason to believe that just one of them has to be responsible for all the water.
At last a source of water that makes the price of Perrier make some sense.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vKz7WnU83E
The hipsters will be lined up for blocks to buy it in a bottle....
The measurements are valid, but IIUC, the dating typically uses the assumption that ther is/was not significant radioactivity in the region.
Yet for dating of rocks, that would require that magma and lava not be radioactive. Tests on Mt. st. Helens lava, though, showed that it is.
Moreover, the oldest areas on earth are where evidence indicates at least the possibility of their having been deMeijer/Van Westrenen style georeactor explosions: the craton around the Hudson, and South Africa (specifically the African Karoo).
That being the case, I find this data interesting, but the conclusions questionable.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
My wife got interested in Doctor Who after me and is catching up. We just watched Waters of Mars (re-watched for me). For the non-Whovians here, the Doctor finds himself at the first Mars colony in the near future where an infestation is spreading. Something in the water supply is turning people into water-spewing alien creatures. Even one drop of their water hitting you is enough to cause the change. The source of this was water from Mars that was isolated in a glacier for quite a long time.
So you'll excuse me if I don't feel just a little afraid. I hope they're properly containing this water. Then again, to quote the Doctor, "Water is patient. Water just waits. Wears down the cliff tops, the mountains. The whole of the world. Water always wins."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The earth has a diameter of 12,000+km, they are 2.4km (about 0.02%) in and getting excited about finds? Dig Deeper...
I'm not signing anything
If you tell me it's freshwater I won't believe you.
"The measurements are valid, but IIUC, the dating typically uses the assumption that ther is/was not significant radioactivity in the region."
No, in this case it assumes that the rocks are significantly radioactive, with natural radioactivity primarily from K, U, and Th, the main sources of natural radioactivity in the Earth, and traces from other sources (usually daughter isotopes in the decay chains from these three).
"Yet for dating of rocks, that would require that magma and lava not be radioactive. Tests on Mt. st. Helens lava, though, showed that it is."
Oh, I see. You're not even trying to formulate a rational argument, you're just parroting some "young Earth" creationist or other pseudoscience nonsense. Badly.
Firstly, what happens to the magma is mostly irrelevant to radiometric dating methods because the minerals involved don't start trapping daughter products until the minerals form and cool sufficiently. It's like the clock is being constantly reset until the rock cools. Granted, there are some situations where it can be more complicated, but usually the story doesn't start until you've actually got a solid rock.
Secondly, practically all rocks are radioactive to some degree, because practically all rocks contain some K, U, or Th. The concentration varies widely, but there's always some in there. If the assumption that rocks were non-radioactive were built into radiometric dating methods it wouldn't make a lot of sense, because rocks are radioactive. So, you're confused about the claims of "tests on Mt. St. Helens" somehow. My guess is that you're trying to mention the fact that Mt. St. Helens lavas do have variable amounts of initial radiogenic, non-atmospheric Ar in them that would affect conventional (whole rock) K-Ar methods, but that's a well-known issue that is not peculiar to Mt. St. Helens and is routinely solved by using Ar-Ar stepwise heating measurements and/or isochron techniques.
Finally, there is no "crater around the Hudson". I'm assuming you mean the curved eastern part of Hudson's Bay in Canada, which is not a crater at all because it doesn't have any of the other attributes of a crater (e.g., impact melt and high-pressure shocked minerals), but is merely a circular basin kind of like the Michigan Basin is. This contrasts with the Vredefort Structure in South Africa which is interpreted as an impact crater. The georeactor explosion stuff you refer to is pure speculation for which there is no evidence. A huge natural nuclear reactor exploding onto the surface of the Earth? Please. Such an event would leave obvious isotopic signatures all over the place if it ever happened (like the obvious isotopic signatures at the genuine Oklo natural reactor, but a thousand times more obvious than that). It's a bit ridiculous to be disputing this research on the basis of an idea that is so bizarre and unsupported.
Better luck with your investigations.
a lot of old farts
'under Ontario'? Ontario is as big as Texas and Montana combined. Maybe we could specify Timmins instead of the whole province. Of course, it's all just rocks and trees and water up here anyway, right?
Before I begin, let me say that I do value all the hard statements you made. They give me something to check out, and consider. The sneer I could do without.
It'll be hard for me to answer a lot of the statements, though, until I *have* checked them out, and considered them. Things like "don't start trapping daughter products..." doesn't seem to me to apply to Pb/Pb dating. Other things, like the claim that "radioactive Mt. St. Helens" is a stretch, I intend to check out.
AFAIK, the De Meijer / Van Westrenen theory is not pure speculation with no evidence. Among other things, the evidence that the moon is mostly earth mantle is pretty significant. Yes, there is dispute about that: with any scientific discussion, there *should* be dispute.
The impact melt and shocked tectites would only apply to a crater if it was an impact site. It would not apply to a crater that was a blowout site.
The bit about parroting "young Earth" creationist nonsense, is itself nonsense. Yes, I do suspect our dating is off, though the I also suspect the order of events is not, and the difference is less than an order of magnitude. No, I don't think the Earth is 10k years old. And no, I don't discount evidence simply because it is brought up by political pariahs [yes, the currently educational establishment does have its own political pariahs].
On the crater around the Hudson, take a look where the Hudson moved from, at the time of Pangea. See if I am not correct that it was approximately at the location of the New England Plume. Now look and see where the Carribean Plate moved from in that time. Again, it came from that same location. Now, go down to the African Karoo, and see where *it* was at the time of Pangea. Now, compare the Karoo at that time to the location, orientation, size and shape of the Scotia Plate, as it is now. I contend that the two plates are upper mantle scars, and the surface features coincide with them. Such alignments do not seem to me to be coincidental, but of similar causation.
As for Vredefort, Vredefort contains a lot of similarities to a megavolcano, such that it would have been assumed to be a megavolcano except for the massive scattering of tectites and shocked minerals. So yes, there was an asteroid strike there.
Let me propose that plumes like the one that make Hawaii *could* have a collection of de Meijer style Ca/U bergs in the mantle. As long as there is no major catastrophe to bring them together, the vapor pressure made by the nuclear fission might well be enough to keep them apart. On the other hand, if an asteroid punches through the mantle at a shallow angle, and drives one of a collection of Ca/U bergs into the center, then it would force the plume georeactor to go massively supercritical.
Once one georeactor went massively supercritical, the shock waves could force other georeactors 1/3 of the way around the globe into going supercritical. So you would be reasonably likely to have a double blowout, a cracking of the Earth's crust that would form a new ocean [the Atlantic].
Aside from that, a double blowout would shatter the earth's crust like a bullet through glass, at both locations. See if there aren't massive kimberlite and lamproite dikes [not pipes], at 850 miles radius around both the Hudson and the Karoo [at the time of pangea: Greenland's separation breaks the circle for now... but not for Pangea]. Kimberlite and lamproites are formed in supersonic explosions that can throw material into orbit. Estimate the energy that got expended when the kimberlites and lamproites were formed. Tell me how that happened, since there was not asteroid strike at the Hudson.
Proof? Nope. Evidence? I'd say there's plenty.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's