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)."

Comments

It is time

[Sparticus789]

If you need me, I will be in my hermetically sealed Doomsday Bunker, just in case a vicious and contagious disease emerges.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

I hope you got it at a discount, 'cause those things can't be used, and diseases can only attack things they co-evolve with. This water is 1.5 billion years old. Plants appeared on land only 1.2 billion years ago. Animals evolved less than 700 million years ago. Just like the with Lake Vostok article from a couple of months ago, all anyone does by making that joke is showing that a meme from bad science fiction is still alive. Please stop. You're hurting yourself. This is the biology equivalent of saying the LHC makes black holes.

Re:It is time

[NeutronCowboy]

Damn. Out of mod points. Someone help!

Re:It is time

[ArcadeMan]

...the LHC makes black holes. - Samantha Wright

Re:It is time

[kryliss]

That's a bunch of crap, that water can't be any older than 6,000 years old!!!

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

You are dead to me, ArcadeMan. Dead to me.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

Nuh-uh! It was in Nature so it must be true!

Re:It is time

[SilentStaid]

You are dead to me, ArcadeMan. Dead to me.

Which is the LHC equivalent of saying: you're the other muon in a Bs meson. Or something.

Re:It is time

[stenvar]

and diseases can only attack things they co-evolve with

There are other reasons why these reservoirs are unlikely to contain pathogens, but your reasons are wrong. One of the most frequent ways in which new diseases appear is when they jump to a species that has no defenses against them. That's because our immune system isn't all powerful, it only really protects us against variants of pathogens we actually encounter in nature.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

No, no whoosh today—you'll recall that Slashdot users made jokes about the LHC black hole thing, too. I even used the word "joke" in my post!

The thing is, culture (especially Western culture) is full of paranoid anxieties about science. From Frankenstein to Terminator, there's always some cynical writer somewhere creating dystopias because pain sells. The longer these ideas remain embedded in culture, the more chance they have to affect public opinion. Eventually this causes a distrust in science to fester, and that's something we need to stand against if we're ever going to survive the next century. I'm generally fine with making young-earth creationism jokes (I've had more than a few myself) because people here are sufficiently well-informed to be able to recite the truth.

But after a certain point it gets worrying that the first response to "look, a glimpse into the ancient past!" is "quick, call CEDA!" What experience does Sparticus789 actually have with biology? If he(?) encounters someone who genuinely believes a George Romero-style outbreak could happen at any moment, what would he say to rebuff them? Would he even have the confidence to speak up? Enough parroting of a meme can kill knowledge of the truth, and at the very least, that must be guarded against. With biology this is particularly sensitive because most people know only a very little amount about it, and yet embracing or rejecting biological research stands to affect us immensely in the future.

So +1 for speaking up, but -1 for reducing that to "whoosh."

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

That only happens in Hollywood.

Seriously, how else do you think they'd select Academy Award winners?

Re:It is time

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

This water predates disease, it predates life on the planet, it even predates global warming.

Re:It is time

[Razgorov Prikazka]

And I suppose saying that the world is only 6000 years old is the biology equivalent of Narnia? I think the water they found is also 6000 years old, but the intelligent creator made it appear to be older to see ho will doubt him.
The intelligent creator also provided me, a man, with nipples, so maybe some day's he is just drunk or just not /that/ intelligent ;-D

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

It really is. Organisms in a stagnant environment adapt to that niche and then... do nothing. We had this exact argument on the Vostok article.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

Is it really so hard to think that a divine being would be lazy enough to re-use code? Fnord.

Re:It is time

[gv250]

Wow, Data was in Star Wars 3? Please either turn in your geek card or put on this red shirt.

He didn't say that Data was in Star Wars III. He said that Data was in Star Wars 3!

Of course. Since Star Wars is released in trilogies, and keeping in mind that the episode numbering uses Roman numerals, not Arabic, the obvious numbering scheme (ordered by release date, not in-universe date) is:

• Star Wars 1
  • Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
  • Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
  • Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
• Star Wars 2
  • Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
  • Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
  • Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
• Star Wars 3
  • Star Wars Episode VII
  • Star Wars Episode VIII
  • Star Wars Episode IX

So, Data will make an appearance in Star Wars 3, probably episode VIII or IX, after Disney buys the Star Trek franchise. Why else would they hire JJ Abrams to direct Episode VII, but to secretly lay the groundwork for the unifying Wars/Trek movie?

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

Oh, sure, it can interact with us. It can interact with us just like tree pollen does: it can bounce off, it can get washed away in a pool of mucus, it can get embedded in earwax, it can get clobbered by a macrophage and digested in a lysosome... those are all forms of interaction!

1.5 billion years ago is 1.5 billion years behind in an arms race—an arms race that is comprised entirely of exploiting vulnerabilities in a hardened enemy. This organism is not used to human physiological conditions. It is not used to the human immune system. Hell, it may even pre-date the concept of complex multicellular life. The idea that the systems could be compatible is, statistically, laughable. It is less than a rounding error.

Biology is not a horror movie, and it is not a computer. Fiction has lied to you.

Personally, I'm a fan of panspermia, but the fossil record goes back so far that what arrived on Earth would necessarily have to be extremely simple; possibly just a handful of nucleic acids (or analogous) with no envelope. Such organisms would be ridiculously delicate, and most likely destroyed instantly by RNases if they were exposed to the modern atmosphere on Earth.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

That's still co-evolution, just with a bit of a gap. "Things" is a nice, vague word. The tree of life still puts limits on how far pathogens can jump.

Re:It is time

[Penguinisto]

The thing is, culture (especially Western culture) is full of paranoid anxieties about science. From Frankenstein to Terminator, there's always some cynical writer somewhere creating dystopias because pain sells. The longer these ideas remain embedded in culture, the more chance they have to affect public opinion.

Well, to be fair some dystopia novels do serve as a good hard warning. As a non-scientific political/ideological example, I present 1984, written precisely at a time when all the intelligentsia were eager to create a global socialistic (albeit not quite communist) utopia.

Same with science, really. I'll set it up to explain why:

75 years ago, scientists were handling radioactive elements like they were as harmless as lumps of play-doh, and every 'good' mother was out there bathing their kids' feet in X-rays for shoe-fitting, at dosages/levels that today would get your kids snatched away by Protective Services if they found out. Eventually, we learned about things like radiation poisoning (though TBH it took a freakin' atomic bomb or two going off before anyone outside of a few select physicists even knew what that was). In other news, during that same time period Eugenics was once considered a solid (and even respected) science... and we all know where that went. The sad part is, that's nothing compared to the almost countless examples of treating science as panacea, without an eye towards ethics or morals, or even caution.

While no, you're not going to spawn a black hole at LHC (the laws of nature are rather resilient against that, and the entire Earth hasn't enough mass to make one), there are some good, hard uses for dystopian fantasy-type warnings. Human genetics stands out as a pretty good one - while I certainly wouldn't expect a 60-foot-tall man-slaying homonculus to come out of it (hell, it wouldn't survive gestation), I can see how genetic mucking-around can open whole populations up to pathogen immunity problems** and eventual congenital defects, among other things - and I haven't even touched on the ethics of the situation.

Besides, some damned good sci-fi has come out of dystopian views of hard science, and yet somehow hasn't retarded scientific progress in spite of it.

Overall, I guess the only reason I'm defending the dystopian genre isn't because I like the topic matter (let's face it, there's a lot of crap novels out there that try to use it), but because it does serve an important watchdog function. Sure, we think we've evolved beyond superstition, but honestly? It doesn't matter how frickin' much we've evolved, because we have yet to evolve beyond human failings: greed, avarice, lust, hatred, etc. So unless your name is Mother Teresa, you suffer from these as much as I do (and she likely suffered from it too, just that she was really good at controlling them).

** note that such problems would likely require many, many generations to surface.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

There could have been a lifeform back then that had the lethality of the plague and the transmissible abilities of the worst flus.

This is an oxymoron for most pathogens. Highly lethal diseases kill too quickly to be transmitted. Certain parasites like Malaria are capable of delaying their impact, but that is only possible because they have spent a long time co-evolving to kill mammals.

Life back then was very different to what we have now. What we could find down here could rewrite history, if anything lives.
Our evolutional timescale could be off by millions of years, we simply do not know yet. Only by digging more to find such underground structures may we ever know for sure.

Without a doubt this is a very important find, but it won't be so world-shattering that the layperson would be affected by it. We have a fairly good idea of what life was like prior to this point in time because of fossil records.

All something would need is a way to attack some very base mechanism that evolution cannot defend against and it is sorted.

Humans already have this. It's called stomach acid, but it doesn't work that well. (If for some reason the organisms we find in the pool use acid-base chemistry as a defence mechanism, that will be worth noting.) Evolution has found ways to defend against ice crystals, a complete vacuum, severe radiation, and temperatures hot enough to boil water. There's nothing it can't defend against. That's why organisms generally work by attacking weaknesses in each other; they yield better results and they're more easy to mutate spontaneously. In order to get past the passive immune system, you have to be at least a little prepared for how mammals work.

There could be multiple lifeforms down there that have been evolving beside each other all that time and fighting for what little resources are there.

And they would evolve in a trajectory completely different from anything we've ever known, totally dependent on the high methane concentrations and hence helpless in our nearly methaneless atmosphere.

Evolution has surprised us before. It will certainly do it again and again. That bag of tricks is larger than a city.

Evolution's surprises never make for good movie plots. The most horrible things that can happen to humans have been happening to them for hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer.

Re:It is time

[viperidaenz]

Who says a disease can only attack things they co-evolve with?
A disease is just another organism. It consumes things and it creates things. If it can consume things and survive inside another organism and the things it produces cause harm, it is a disease.

What you're saying only really applies to a virus, not a bacterial infection or any other kind of parasite.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

It's a fine line to walk, certainly, and that's hard to squeeze adequately into a Slashdot post. I agree with your views. Brave New World is a title that has had an immense impact on the world, much like Nineteen Eighty-Four, and these were very important resources in preventing the world from becoming unhinged at critical moments in the twentieth century. A good book can be a powerful tool—although, be wary, as books can present garbage and convoluted logic and still be just as accepted. (Annoyed glares go to War and Peace and She Who Must Not Be Named.)

My complaint is really about the influence of trash on popular culture. The Andromeda Strain, to pick a random title from a vast genre, presents a completely implausible story, but has contributed to the long-running idea that nature is out to kill us. Carl Sagan was similarly upset about the repetitiousness of fictional portrayals of aliens as hostile, if you'll recall.

As for the radium situation: I've done a bit of reading on this, and it's worth noting that the Radium Corporation actively tried to suppress information about the dangers of its products. The result was a lot of regulation, which has generally been successful in protecting health. Caution, in this case, was prevalent.

I somewhat suspect, though, that all important/successful dystopian novels have concentrated on ethical issues: people hurting each other or the environment. Fear of the world beyond us has, so far, been comparatively unproductive.

Re:It is time

[lgw]

While no, you're not going to spawn a black hole at LHC (the laws of nature are rather resilient against that, and the entire Earth hasn't enough mass to make one), there are some good, hard uses for dystopian fantasy-type warnings.

Since this thread is about dispelling common false beliefs, I feel like I should pitch in here: general relativity sets no minimum for the mass of a black hole! If you get energy density high enough, you get a black hole. Quantum mechanics does suggest a likely minimum energy (though until GR and Quantum are reconciled, it's guesswork), but that minimum is still pretty low.

The right question to ask is "can the LHC create a black hole which is a threat to anything?" and the answer is "no, black holes that small just don't last long enough to grow larger (if one was somehow created in the first place)".

Re:It is time

[lgw]

"Checkov, put on this red shirt and get down to engineering" - Kirk, Start Wars 8

Re:It is time

[viperidaenz]

Perhaps Star Wars 3 will be X, XI and XII with Star Wars 4 being VII, VIII and IX. 1 and 2 were swapped around, why won't Mickey swap 3 and 4?

Re: It is time

[viperidaenz]

Would you consider curing* cancer a superpower?

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

By definition, a parasite is something that has co-evolved with its host. Occasionally you do get species-jumping, but there are limits in how far this can go before the target is just too alien for the invader to adapt to. It takes a lot of exposure and a long time for evolution to enact any drastic changes.

Simple, self-sufficient organisms like bacteria are a little more successful in exploring new environments, but their tendency to do harm is generally accidental, and requires a certain degree of metabolic compatibility. If you eat a handful of dirt, for example, you'll get an upset stomach for a while as the new bacteria produce byproducts that are incompatible with the rest of your intestinal flora, and then you'll get diarrhoea as your body takes steps to eliminate the threat. Evading detection, or breaking the immune system (like HIV) requires a lot of specialized, highly-directed effort. All cells are covered in glycoproteins that act as friend-or-foe markers; that's how antibodies work.

Above all else, the organisms in such an ancient pool have no incentive to attack anything else. With such limited resources and such a small space they're probably used to growing very slowly to prevent overpopulation. They may even have been destroyed by accident when they were exposed to the air.

Re:It is time

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I hope you got it at a discount, 'cause those things can't be used, and diseases can only attack things they co-evolve with. This water is 1.5 billion years old. Plants appeared on land only 1.2 billion years ago. Animals evolved less than 700 million years ago. Just like the with Lake Vostok article from a couple of months ago, all anyone does by making that joke is showing that a meme from bad science fiction is still alive. Please stop. You're hurting yourself. This is the biology equivalent of saying the LHC makes black holes.

You understand that, in this 1950s movie, you play the role of arrogant know-it-all who gets eaten, screaming as you lean back and the camera jams your face, don't you?

Re:It is time

[chipperdog]

Yes, be afraid of the LHC and the old water, because it's not like we're modifying the DNA of the food we consume purely for corporate profits

Re:It is time

[Sparticus789]

What experience does Sparticus789 actually have with biology?

I am not a biologist by any means. But I do have a strong enough understanding of science to understand that in reality, nothing will emerge from this lake that is hazardous to humans. Whatever lifeforms present in the lake will most likely be prokaryotic cells which do not have the capability of interacting the modern eukaryotic cells, since they have never had the chance to evolve into anything which has the potential to be damaging.

And as far as I am concerned, if someone is stupid enough to believe a Modded "Funny" comment on /. to be the absolute truth, then they should probably be banned from reproducing. It is not my job to "inform" the world about how non-dangerous any of this is. If people want to be educated, they can educate themselves. If they want to be stupid, they have that right too.

Re:It is time

[Sparticus789]

I consider myself a "god" in the computer realm and I re-use code on a daily basis.

Re:It is time

[LynnwoodRooster]

SURE. Like we're supposed to believe a scientific posting on Slashdot over dozens of Hollywood movies?

Re:It is time

[LynnwoodRooster]

it's not like we're modifying the DNA of the food we consume purely for corporate profits

Hate to tell you, but mankind has been doing that for at least as long as horticulture and trading has been around, probably 15,000 years at the very least.

Re: It is time

[turbidostato]

Deep water? 1.5 billion years? And you think it's not something worrisome!?
Cthuluh, I claim, nothing but Cthuluh!

Re:It is time

[Timmy D Programmer]

Lots of diseases out there, especially bacterial and fungal have VERY flexible diets. So back into your bunker Sparticus789 ;-) Only viruses and prions are limited to hurting things they co-evolve with (or ones with similar/same proteins).

Re:It is time

[D1G1T]

Cthulhu cares not for your childish linear 4 dimensional conceptions of biology. And now after more than a billion years trapped in a cyclopean prison of ancient stone he has been RELEASED!

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

Admittedly, the Old Ones are a slightly more credible threat.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

There wouldn't be; it was just for the sake of illustration.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

I am glad—and relieved—to hear that. Just one small thing:

If people want to be educated, they can educate themselves. If they want to be stupid, they have that right too.

Many people have not been given the choice either way, because they have been subjected to stupid people so thoroughly that what glimpses of the truth they hear are incomprehensible or immediately discounted. Many young people with creationist parents are in this boat; it's only by chance that they're given an opportunity to think differently. (And this obviously applies to other subjects, too, like the entire population of North Korea. They may doubt, but they have no way of knowing better.)

Like it or not, you do have a responsibility to make sure your audience can distinguish a joke from the truth when you make it, otherwise you risk misinforming them. And as many replies to my first post in this thread show, many people here can't.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

No, no, that was last week's script. They couldn't make the monster look unconvincing enough, so now we're going with the robot invasion/mind control subplot.

Re: It is time

[Samantha Wright]

The only argument I have against this is that it's in Northern Ontario, which is like Minnesota, only hillier, and far, far too boring for a south-pacific jet-setter like the Great Dead One.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

As Lynnwood points out, most, if not all, GM crop modifications are simply more direct ways of achieving what we've already been doing for thousands of years through plant domestication: resistance to damp, drought, heat, cold, pests, and pesticides. The biggest danger is that these improvements will transfer into weeds, nullifying the utility of herbicides. Few if any crop modifications are a threat to human health.

The real issues are about various kinds of monopolies: these modifications are patented and hence not freely available, and if a single strain of (for example) wheat is used everywhere on the planet, then the whole food supply can be wiped out by one disease. The danger is hence not in the modified thing itself, but what humans do with it.

This is a perfect example of how severely the public has been misinformed.

Re:It is time

[viperidaenz]

Of course any effects would be accidental.
You don't need to live long in a host to do damage. Excreting compounds inside something that has never been in contact with them before may cause undesired outcomes, like death.

Organisms at the level of bacteria don't attack. They simply feed and reproduce.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

That's a good way to get through high school, but by the time you hit your twenties, you should be viciously digging through Wikipedia on a daily basis. At least, that's what we do nowadays. I guess that wasn't so practical back before the invention of the encyclopedia.

...and I'm guessing you know the glass thing is false and those windows are actually thicker at the bottom because the glass was spun on a wheel. Centrifugal force caused the outer edge to get thicker. You can occasionally find the work of less thoughtful glaziers where the windows were installed upside-down. And it was a mediaeval cathedral, not just an old house!

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

Well, they can attack, but I don't want to give anyone nightmares. Cryptosporidium is unnerving enough as it is, and that's a well-developed metazoan.

And granted, there are bacteria that secrete toxins as a defence mechanism, but the chance of an extreme reaction is fairly small for something that has never had to defend itself against animals. The kinds of random compounds you see excreted by exotic isolated bacteria may be irritants, but they're nonspecific and don't cause all that much damage. The more specific the target, the more dangerous it can be. (Consider, for example, Brevetoxin.) Unless, y'know, it can secrete a superacid or something, which would be very strange.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

A flexible diet usually means the organism is oriented toward rapid reproduction and is not all that good at surviving. Our innate immune system is great at dealing with that kind of pest.

Re:It is time

[Capsaicin]

That's a bunch of crap, that water can't be any older than 6,000 years old!!!

No, no no ... it was created 6,000 years ago, but it is by no means beyond God's power to create billion year old water should He so will it. Sheesh!

Re: It is time

[Samantha Wright]

The question was never whether or not it was a joke, but how conscious the author was of the implications of the statement, and whether or not the joke reflected a genuine anxiety. During the cold war, there was plenty of black humour about nuclear attacks, but few people, if any, discounted the dangers of it.

However, you do get a gold star for correctly guessing my nationality.

Re:It is time

[riverat1]

Interestingly enough males can lactate given the proper hormonal stimulation.

Re:It is time

[riverat1]

The kind of DNA modifications we can do now are on a whole different scale than those we were capable of before the development of gene splicing.

Re:It is time

[Macgrrl]

/facepalm

Don't go giving creationists big ideas on how to explain away reality.

Re:It is time

[Capsaicin]

Don't go giving creationists big ideas on how to explain away reality.

Had you bothered to followed that link, you would have noticed that creationists have been running that argument since at least 1857. "/facepalm" indeed Sara.

Re: It is time

[turbidostato]

"The only argument I have against this is that it's in Northern Ontario"

Yes, I took it into account. Weggener was slightly wrong: Ontario was in Minnesota 1.5B years ago (or the other way around, not completly sure about that)

Re:It is time

[BetterThanCaesar]

That would require quite a large leap in time though. Star Trek is set in the 23th century and later; Star Wars is set "a long long time ago". Well, not counting for all the time travelling that goes on in Star Trek...

Re:It is time

[stenvar]

"Things" is a nice, vague word.

Yes, you used it first, and I repeated it quite consciously; I thought it was quite unprofessional for someone who claims to be a biologist.

The tree of life still puts limits on how far pathogens can jump.

And the biochemical basis of those limits is... oh, you don't know, because there aren't any.

Re:It is time

[david_thornley]

And I'm sure Disney will treat Star Wars and Star Trek canon with the exact same painstaking demand for accuracy that they did for, say, Greek mythology in Hercules.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

Ah, yes, because bacteriophages regularly harass mammals. Excuse me while I stare at you. It's very bold of you to make that kind of accusation with my comment history.

For a virus to transit between hosts, it needs regular access to both a stable host and a target host. It must be able to adapt to the surface receptors on the target host, it must exploit the cellular machinery in a manner that the target host does not innately defend against, and it must be able to do so without completely losing relevance in its original reproductive environment. It must also avoid presenting any antigens that would be easily be picked up by the target.

In practice, this means that vertebrates are isolated from the rest of the evolutionary tree. The number of spontaneous inventions necessary to jump from, say, an amoeba to a dog, is prohibitive. This is not to say the distance is completely insurmountable, but it is rather like randomly carving the correct key for a door in one attempt. The majority of well-studied viruses only affect an extremely limited host range, such as one species; rabies is considered exceptional for its ability to affect a large number of mammals. Most likely, viruses either co-evolved with the rest of the tree, since we can see the development of the immune system by following it.

Complex parasites like protozoans are about on par in terms of their hosts' physiology to survive. They require more nutrients, which means a long period of interaction, and hence a long interval of evasion. There are over two hundred Plasmodium species that target different higher animals, but like human Malaria, their core metabolic cycle depends on harvesting haemoglobin, which makes them irrelevant to non-vertebrates.

Pathogenic bacteria are a little different: most are natural body flora that have developed toxicity to the host. These can be very non-specific in the environments they dwell in; some bacteria, like Baccilus thuringiensis, can survive in a huge range of environments, have a spore form to protect against unfavourable conditions, and emit defensive toxins as needed. Bt is so successful that whole cells have been spread over crops as an insecticide, and its primary toxin has been spliced into corn by Monsanto to accomplish the same effect.

The trick here, however, is that there is once more a limitation on how far the toxin itself can be useful, and this constrains host-jumping much like viral evolution. Constant exposure to the new environment is required, and hardened species typically have closed genomes not receptive to horizontal gene transfer. As a result, vertebrate pests keep with vertebrates, insect pests keep with insects, and plant pests keep with plants (and so on for every other phylum and kingdom.) The amount of energy necessary to jump between hosts over such long distances, combined with the abundance of already-extant pathogens at the target, creates an energetically unfavourable challenge. It is more likely that a strain would lose its pathogenicity to one species and then develop an entirely separate pathogenicity, in which case they should probably be regarded as two separate diseases.

This leaves diseases that are almost completely non-specific: detritovores. It would probably be best to say they can't jump between kingdoms, as their entire metabolic system is oriented toward processing either animal, plant, fungal, or bacterial food, which generally corresponds to the available nutrients found in the host.

So, there you go: the very real, very diverse biochemical basis for the limits on how far pathogens can jump.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

It is erroneous to assume that humankind will succumb to natural selection. Self destruction, maybe, but there is nothing on this planet that can select against us—short of, y'know, extreme environmental pressures. The human mind is, as far as this planet knows, the final card to play in the evolutionary race. Evolution for us is cultural now; something we can change at any time, in response to detailed analyses of a situation. That's miles better than waiting for reproduction to stumble onto the right combination by accident.

Re:It is time

[cellocgw]

Yeah, but even if it's incredibly unlikely that this ancient organism is dangerous, an outbreak of beta-hemoth (I don't know how to post a greek character there) makes for one great story.

Re:It is time

[stenvar]

Obviously, the only kind of pathogen that would be relevant in this discussion would be bacteria. There is no basis for your belief that pathogenic bacteria "can't jump between kingdoms". In different word, your claim is bogus.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

It sure does! And there's nothing wrong with that unless people can't separate fact from fiction. Which they can't, because they haven't been taught what's real.

Re:It is time

[cellocgw]

Heh. I like to ask people if they have trouble distinguishing fact from reality.

And, sadly, even when people *are* taught what's real, they ignore that information most of the time in favor of believing what they want to believe.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

By all means, feel free to demonstrate of an example where a plant toxin emitted by a bacterium suddenly starts affecting an animal or vice versa.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

Just remember—most of those people are victims in some sense, whether it be of a bad childhood that impeded education or an ideology that actively seeks to deny them a sense of worldliness as a method of control. No matter how mean-spirited or loud-mouthed they may get, "sadly" is indeed the right adverb for the situation.

Re:It is time

[stenvar]

There are several pathogens that infect both plants and animals, including Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Aspergillus. In addition, bacterial diseases often involve virulence factors carried by plasmids. Ancient bacteria can easily acquire such plasmids, resulting in a novel pathogen that is hard to recognize by modern immune systems, yet carries modern virulence factors. Now, why do you think again that ancient bacteria cannot result in novel diseases?

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

I dug up the Rahme et al. paper on P. aeruginosa, and it would be better to describe the strains with double-virulence as hosts of two pathogens; indeed, most strains of P. aeruginosa only attack one kingdom or the other. The gene gacA is required for attacking plants, and plays no role in attacking mammals. Most of the genes that are shared between the two mechanisms are simply involved in the export of extracellular products. The same can be said of Aspergillus spp.; the major group of animal toxins produced by them, the aflatoxins, do not harm plants.

This leads to an idea that may not sit comfortably with you, but I think is honest: bacteria that actively participate in horizontal gene transfer (through plasmids, phages, or any other mechanism) are not, themselves, diseases, but merely hosts. It would be more accurate, if perhaps not always medically pragmatic, to say that the genes responsible are the actual pathogens. Two pathogenic plasmids that occupy the same cell but target different hosts are no different from two pathogenic plasmids that occupy different cells which are both abundant in the environment. If such a plasmid got into an ancient bacterium and were functional, it would be best-described as a new strain of an old problem.

That all being said, I do not believe modern plasmids would be compatible with bacteria that have been isolated for 1.5 billion years. It is unlikely that they would have retained compatible promoter sequences over that interval. As we see in obligate parasites that are constrained to consistent and resource-rich niches, the rate of evolution is greatly enhanced, as fewer genes are necessary for survival.

I strongly believe it is wrong to assume that a completely alien surface would go undetected by the immune system; if it were, the most successful human viruses would have strange and randomly-generated exteriors, and would not bother with mimicking and pilfering human surface elements. If an ancient bacterium did have a good surface for evading the immune system, it would probably be because it is extremely barren. As many Archaeans have protein cell walls and can form biofilms, the entire tree of life is heavily laden with crowded exteriors, and hence we have no reason to believe that an extremely barren exterior would be likely for anything after the Bacteria–Archaea split.

Re:It is time

[stenvar]

I think we have established that it is possible for ancient bacteria to give rise to new diseases. You're now waving your hands about the details.

Re:It is time

[uninformedLuddite]

If humanity is the final card played in the evolutionary race then Samantha is the joker.

Re:It is time

[uninformedLuddite]

The most horrible things that can happen to humans have been happening to them for hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer.

You have only been posting here for a short while so that is patently untrue.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

Your supposed counter-examples are all cases that do not violate the original co-evolution constraint. You claimed that an unfamiliar, non-adaptive bacterium would have a superior ability to evade the human immune system, when all medical evidence suggests that viruses are only able to keep ahead of the race by mimicking human antigens and mutating extremely rapidly. You claimed that a plasmid could "easily" be acquired by an ancient bacterium, even though analogous systems show that such extreme isolation can cause changes as dramatic as alterations in the genetic code. These ancient bacteria are disadvantaged in every imaginable way when compared against modern species, and to such an extreme degree that the point is meaningless to argue. It is comparable to discussing flying pigs.

Do you actually know anything about evolutionary genomics or is your entire life oriented around dismissing others to make yourself feel better, as your post history suggests? You've dodged every single one of my posts, done no work to "establish" anything, and brought up irrelevant examples. I don't think you should have gotten yourself into this conversation.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

Ooh, ooh! Now do one about a famous historical figure!

Re:It is time

[uninformedLuddite]

I thought I had?

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

I am genuinely impressed by that comeback.

Re:It is time

[uninformedLuddite]

Liar liar pants on fire

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

That one is a little less impressive, but kudos for investing the time and energy. It's creative in its own way.

Re:It is time

[uninformedLuddite]

Having been with /. for a long time and seeing the changes that have occurred over the last few years I felt that I too had to make a change. I threw away my low UID and created a new persona that is best explained by with my username. Strangely, very few seem to notice that before engaging in conversation. Even stranger still is that I have always had good karma. I enjoy reading /. but rarely participate meaningfully bar thoughtful modding. Don't mind me as my attempts to start my experimental cold fusion reactor with a laser pointer and an egg have left me in a rather grumpy frame of mind that I may have taken out on you. I am surprised that I didn't read any comments about the possibility of a single celled organism as big as a house (aka the/a blob) being a distinct possibility. After all, what else are the Michigan Militia useful for?

Re:It is time

[uninformedLuddite]

I really really really need to preview/edit/think before hitting post. Sorry.

Re:It is time

[uninformedLuddite]

In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, "I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?" - http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm

I think we can put some blame on the school system too

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

To be honest, I think perhaps the name comes across as a self-conscious conservative title, i.e. something you get called so often you adopted it as a moniker to pre-empt the insult. (Which, I guess, is the point.) But, hey, we all have lousy days. And weeks. And months. And years... I'm a little too young to be a life coach, but have you considered buying a really expensive car? That seems to be the standard solution to this kind of problem.

As for cells, the largest single-celled organism I know of off the top of my head is an ostrich or dinosaur egg (which doesn't really count since it's not fully alive for long, and generally holds something else), followed by the Mermaid's wineglass, a ridiculously large alga (up to 10 cm or about 4 inches.) There may be larger. In general, large single-cell organisms are unpopular because they provide a single point of failure and can't specialize, meaning they have to do everything at once, which gets cluttered. It's a little like running a mainframe with no service contract.

I think the most exciting thing about the Michigan Militia is the faint implication that Ontario might invade at any moment. It is sad that their website does not mention this. Oh, what could have been.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

That's pretty scary. I'm pretty sure we covered all of those in grade one, and it just so happens I was in grade one in 1995. The Ontario curriculum was a bit tougher, it seems.

Then again, asking an eleven-year-old to read and understand Thoreau or Shakespeare sounds like a classic Victorian misunderstanding of childhood development. Piaget may not be perfect (or up to date, for that matter), but educators believed some truly absurd things before then. Carroll was certainly a good pick, and a lot more accessible.

And... yeah, I think you know all the possible explanations for why the school system is broken already, so I won't bother rehashing old threads.

Re:It is time

[uninformedLuddite]

To be honest, I think perhaps the name comes across as a self-conscious conservative title

You should never begin a sentence with 'To be honest' as it makes it clear that you are about to lie or at least misrepresent the truth.

I'm a little too young to be a life coach, but have you considered buying a really expensive car?

I bought a helicopter. Does that count?

As for cells, the largest single-celled organism I know of off the top of my head

Maybe that should be just under the top of your head? Did you really think that 'pants on fire' was the keynote of my repertoire?

To be honest, I think I like you.

Re:It is time

[uninformedLuddite]

And... yeah, I think you know all the possible explanations for why the school system is broken already, so I won't bother rehashing old threads.

I assure you that I don't. The Underground History of American Education is well worth a read. Or at least listen to what he has to say.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

I see you are skilled in the art of dad humour. It suits you, I think. To be honest.

Re:It is time

[uninformedLuddite]

I am not a dad. I have two dogs and a chicken though. Very clever.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

The sheer lengths of his tract and interview are impressive, and I am compelled by the numerous footnotes. Clearly, this is a work of profound augustness.

I do have a key objection, though, and perhaps you can lay it to rest—he doesn't seem to be in touch with modern practices in other countries; or at least I haven't noticed any mention of them in my cursory glances. Did you notice any?

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

And a helicopter! Surely that is equivalent somehow. Surely.

Re:It is time

[Bust0ut]

Where in the Bible does it say 6000 years? So this post also makes the invisible true?

Re:It is time

[uninformedLuddite]

It is only 7.75 inches long. So that might say something.

Re:It is time

[uninformedLuddite]

It is a history of American education. I do wonder though if your cursory glance looked at the table of contents.

Re:It is time

[Samantha Wright]

It did, much to my disappointment. All mentions of other methods of teaching are those that have been imported. There was something about Prince Charles visiting in 1988, but it was only for the sake of analogy, and the British schooling system is rather lackluster. In fact the vignette seemed rather pointlessly antagonistic, but perhaps there was context somewhere between what the chapter itself described and the events of April 19, 1775 that I missed.

3. Profit

[Bosconian]

Bottle it.
Then sell it at $50 a pop with dubious claims about health benefits.

"Billioneia Aquifer" - You can taste the years.

Re:3. Profit

[EGenius007]

Pfft, you obviously need to sell the homeopathic version that's been diluted 10,000x to be even more effective.

Re:3. Profit

[tinkerton]

Pfft, you obviously need to sell the homeopathic version that's been diluted 10,000x to be even more effective.

What, a dilution factor 2C or 4X? That won't be very potent . They'll think your'e a quack!

Re:3. Profit

[tinkerton]

$5 a bottle to make ice cubes with for use in exclusive whisky. It might sell.

Nice try....

[krovisser]

Where they there to see it trapped? Then how do they know!?

Re:Nice try....

[bunratty]

I suppose you could say that about anything that happened over 120 years ago.

Re:Nice try....

[Buggz]

Where they there to see it trapped? Then how do they know!?

I see you're keeping slashdot's tradition of not reading TFA. Here's what the very short article says about that:

To date the water, the team used three lines of evidence, all based on the relative abundances of various isotopes of noble gases present in the water. The authors determined that the fluid could not have contacted Earth's atmosphere — and so been at the planet's surface — for at least 1 billion years, and possibly for as long as 2.64 billion years, not long after the rocks it flows through formed.

Re:Nice try....

[houbou]

Based on what I read:

They looked at the decay of radioactive atoms found in the water and calculated that it had been bottled up for a long time — at least 1.5 billion years

They found that the water is rich in dissolved gases like hydrogen, methane and different forms of noble gases such as helium, neon, argon and xenon.

They say there is as much hydrogen in the water as around hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean.

Re:Nice try....

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I'm pretty sure GPP is making fun of Ken Ham's thought-stopping advice to his followers, which is supposed to immediately make "evolutionists" stop dead in their tracks, fall down on their knees, pray for forgiveness, and embrace the obvious Truth. Or something like that.

Re:Nice try....

[SupplyMission]

You might think that comment was "skeptical" or that it demonstrates your "critical thinking" but really, it was just plain ignorant. Based on this comment, one might reasonably assume you fall in with the kind of douchetards that yell out "42! Haha!" every time a mathematical discussion takes place.

To answer your question, you might start by reading the article. It talks about isotopes and geochemistry.

Then you could do some reading at the library to find out more about isotopes and geochemistry, and why these things are interesting and important. If you want to go further, you could take an undergraduate degree in geology, where you will learn all kinds of strange and wonderful things about the Earth, and how we can know about things that occurred billions of years ago.

Re:Nice try....

[Buggz]

I still have to wait four minutes before I get to drink my freshly made coffee. Maybe it'll make the whoosh hurt less than the facepalm. :/

Re:Nice try....

[Colonel Korn]

You might think that comment was "skeptical" or that it demonstrates your "critical thinking" but really, it was just plain ignorant. Based on this comment, one might reasonably assume you fall in with the kind of douchetards that yell out "42! Haha!" every time a mathematical discussion takes place.

To answer your question, you might start by reading the article. It talks about isotopes and geochemistry.

Then you could do some reading at the library to find out more about isotopes and geochemistry, and why these things are interesting and important. If you want to go further, you could take an undergraduate degree in geology, where you will learn all kinds of strange and wonderful things about the Earth, and how we can know about things that occurred billions of years ago.

In his defense, he was making a joke about ignorance.

Re:Nice try....

[ColdWetDog]

It's a rough crowd this morning.

Re:Nice try....

[Beardo the Bearded]

They'll just say god made it look that old.

Re:Nice try....

[Daniel Dvorkin]

:)

Re:Nice try....

[riverat1]

I guess everyone should try to get their first cup of coffee in them before they open up /. in the morning.

Water

[VAXcat]

There is water at the bottom of the ocean!

Re:Water

[Rob the Bold]

There is water at the bottom of the ocean!

Still, finding a sample untouched for more than 1.5 Billion years is a once in a lifetime discovery.

Re:Water

[cyberchondriac]

.. in Bikini Bottom.

Re:Water

[Anonymous Coward]

There is water at the bottom of the ocean!

Still, finding a sample untouched for more than 1.5 Billion years is a once in a lifetime discovery.

If we assume a lifetime is 100 years, that would make it a 1 in 15,000,000 lifetimes discovery.

Re:Water

[EETech1]

Same as it ever was...

Re:Water

[LynnwoodRooster]

Remember and WANTING to remember are two different things...

Re:Water

[proverbialcow]

Water under the water, covering the water?

Ontario - Canada's fat, lazy province

[Anne_Nonymous]

I find it hard to believe that Ontario has been so geologically inactive as to leave this water undisturbed for the last billion years.

Re:Ontario - Canada's fat, lazy province

[Anonymous Coward]

We're big-boned you insensitive clod ... besides, if this was Alberta, they'd have polluted it by now digging for oil.

Re:Ontario - Canada's fat, lazy province

[Samantha Wright]

Perhaps you are not familiar with how old the joint actually is?

Re:Ontario - Canada's fat, lazy province

[StrangeBrew]

Alberta isn't 'digging' for oil. We are slowly separating British Columbia from the mainland. This will accomplish two things: 1) Provide Alberta with it's own seaports. 2) Ensure those B.C. hippies are physically isolated from the rest of the country.

Re:Ontario - Canada's fat, lazy province

[Ashenkase]

We have this really big, really old, really rocky thing called the Canadian Shield. The mine happens to bore straight down into it as well.

Re:Ontario - Canada's fat, lazy province

[ArcadeMan]

Alberta isn't 'digging' for oil. We are slowly separating British Columbia from the mainland.

Thanks for the laugh.

Re:Ontario - Canada's fat, lazy province

[ArcadeMan]

Ontario and Québec both have this thing called hydro-electricity, so cranking up to 23 in the winter doesn't apply.

Seriously though... 23? Are you 70 or something?

Re:Ontario - Canada's fat, lazy province

[Ashenkase]

Yeah, one and a half miles deep

I don't understand your "funny" numbers. The water was found 2.8 km underground.

Re:Ontario - Canada's fat, lazy province

[Skrapion]

Yeah, it's been pretty good for science, actually. In addition to this new discovery, another one of these deep mines in the shield made for an excellent neutrino observatory.

We all know

[Silpher]

God put it there to rattle our belief..

Re:We all know

[iggymanz]

She can be a real Bitch like that sometimes

Re:We all know

[wbr1]

No, the devil put dinosaurs here.

In related news:

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ...

Silurian reservoir

[The Grim Reefer]

The Silurians are going to be pissed.

Have comics and movies taught us nothing?

[kannibal_klown]

Seriously, this is just a science-fiction disaster waiting to happen.

I, for one, welcome our new "Thing" overlords.

The Andromeda, Strains Logic

[neoshroom]

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.

Somewhere out there...

[Alejux]

A writer is creating the script for the next so-horrible-it's-funny SyFy movie.

Still fizzy

[Smivs]

This is amazing. 1 billion year old mineral water and it's still fizzy!

Anomalocaris

[Tablizer]

It would be cool if an explorer became the first human ever attacked by a live anomalocaris. Oh the movies & games it would spawn...

Re:They found the lair of the Midgard Serpent

[cyberchondriac]

cue Ragnarok and Wagnerian music..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rmungandr

or the Well of Urðr

Measurement exactly?

[DarthVain]

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.

Re:Measurement exactly?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's technical.

Okay, basically there are a bunch of noble gas isotopes (He, Ne, Ar, and Xe). Some of these are generated by radioactive decay of isotopes within the Earth, and some are not, having been generated by nuclear fusion in the stars that eventually went supernova and were subsequently swept up by gravity to form the solar system. Over geological time, the ratio between these essentially "fixed"/inherited/initial isotopic amounts in the Earth and the newer "radiogenic" isotopes changes. This can be measured in the present-day atmosphere, which amounts to a kind of time-and-geographically-averaged sample of what is currently outgassing from the entire Earth. By contrast, if you isolate/trap some of these gasses in minerals or fractures and fail to mix them with newer radiogenic sources over time, then they're going to preserve the isotopic ratios from the time that they first got trapped and last interacted with the isotopic mixture that was slowly outgassing from the Earth at the time. The change in the isotopic ratios are something you can pretty easily project backwards if you know the average composition of the Earth, which we do (based on some types of meteorites that fall here and that represent undifferentiated leftovers from the formation of the solar system). Measure the isotopic composition of the fluid sample, look along that line describing how the isotopic ratios have changed over Earth history due to known rates of decay and concentrations, and you can estimate the corresponding age of the sample. The focus in this paper is Xe isotopes, but they have data for Ne, He, and Ar as well.

This is *not* a traditional radiometric dating method, which ordinarily uses minerals, not fluids. Furthermore, for minerals it's usually fairly easy to look at the mineralogy of a sample at a microscopic scale and assess whether it is likely the system has remained closed (isolated from isotopic exchange with its surroundings) before analyzing the sample. For example, if a feldspar grain containing K has been partly altered into micas, this shows up clearly and would indicate that any result from the K/Ar method wouldn't reliably give you the age of the feldspar.

The method with the fluids is almost the reverse. If the system had not remained closed/isolated (the normal expectation), then the multiple isotopic systems shouldn't yield a similar age. They do (within measurement uncertainties), implying the bold interpretation that the fluids have indeed been isolated for that long.

An additional wrinkle is that they are analyzing fluids both from fractures and from what are called "fluid inclusions", which are microscopic (typically 100 microns or less) pockets of fluid trapped within individual mineral grains (trapping fluids at the time the grain crystallized). Being able to compare those two types allows some additional assessment of mixing between fluids of different generations and origins (e.g., shallow crustal versus deep mantle fluids) and a host of other subtleties. Additional information is also provided by comparing to previously-published fluid analyses from other locations (South Africa and Australia) that are already known to be about the same host rock age. In any case, finding that fluid inclusions have an "ancient" isotopic signature isn't that big a deal (it means the minerals haven't been recrystallized by processes since then). The big surprise is finding that even the larger fractures seem to show the same signature rather than that of water with more modern isotopic compositions. That's amazing. And deserves some skepticism, which the authors try to address by looking at the other isotopic systems.

That's about as far as I can get with only a few paragraphs of explanation. It only scratches the surface, but I hope it helps.

But does it...

[Nidi62]

mix well with Scotch?

You probably thought I was going to ask if it ran Linux, didn't you?

Re:But does it...

[void*]

Scotch == Neat, or you're doing it wrong. ;)

Re:But does it...

[mu51c10rd]

No...I was thinking you were going to ask if it would liquid cool a Linux box...

But... it's "holy water"

[1800maxim]

which you faithless cannot understand

Does this help determine where our water is from?

[ruiner13]

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?

Justification

[SuperKendall]

At last a source of water that makes the price of Perrier make some sense.

Re:Measurement exactly?//flaws

[MickLinux]

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.

Waters of Mars... I mean, Earth

[Jason Levine]

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."

Seriously...

[sidevans]

The earth has a diameter of 12,000+km, they are 2.4km (about 0.02%) in and getting excited about finds? Dig Deeper...

Freshwater?

[marciot]

If you tell me it's freshwater I won't believe you.

under Ontario?

[_BrianMahoney]

'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?

Re:Measurement exactly?//flaws

[MickLinux]

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.