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Water Isolated for Over a Billion Years Found Under Ontario
ananyo writes "Scientists working 2.4 kilometers below Earth's surface in a Canadian mine have tapped a source of water that has remained isolated for at least a billion years. The researchers say they do not yet know whether anything has been living in it all this time, but the water contains high levels of methane and hydrogen — the right stuff to support life. Micrometer-scale pockets in minerals billions of years old can hold water that was trapped during the minerals' formation. But no source of free-flowing water passing through interconnected cracks or pores in Earth's crust has previously been shown to have stayed isolated for more than tens of millions of years (paper abstract)."
If you need me, I will be in my hermetically sealed Doomsday Bunker, just in case a vicious and contagious disease emerges.
sudo make me a sandwich
Bottle it.
Then sell it at $50 a pop with dubious claims about health benefits.
"Billioneia Aquifer" - You can taste the years.
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
Where they there to see it trapped? Then how do they know!?
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 ...
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.
The Silurians are going to be pissed.
Generally parasites co-evolve with their hosts. Because of this, it is actually fairly unlikely to unearth some vicious ancient virus from waters a billion years old. Billions of years ago all that existed was bacteria and the oldest viruses we know about go back only hundreds of millions of years.
That said I fully endorse your Hermetic seal and wish you well in your initiating our flippered friends into the alchemic ways.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
This is amazing. 1 billion year old mineral water and it's still fizzy!
Smivs on the intertubes!
You probably thought I was going to ask if it ran Linux, didn't you?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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.