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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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.

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]

$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....

[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. :/

Water

[VAXcat]

There is water at the bottom of the ocean!

Re:Water

[cyberchondriac]

.. in Bikini Bottom.

Re:Water

[EETech1]

Same as it ever was...

Re:Water

[proverbialcow]

Water under the water, covering the water?

We all know

[Silpher]

God put it there to rattle our belief..

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

Still fizzy

[Smivs]

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

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?