Oldest water on earth: Researchers have found what they believe is the oldest water on Earth beneath the Canadian Shield.
LiveScience.com reported that a pocket of water is 2.6 billion years old was discovered in a mile around two miles beneath the surface of the Earth near Timmins. The finding was published in the May 16 issue of “Nature.”
“This is the oldest (water) anybody has been able to pull out, and quite frankly, it changes the playing field,” geologist Barbara Sherwood Lollar, with the University of Toronto, told the Calgary Herald. She helped lead the study.
LiveScience reported that the water seeped into cracks in the mine.
The oldest known reservoirs of water date back only tens of millions of years, according to Discovery News.
“For the first time, we found that waters of this age can be preserved on our planet,” Lollar told Discovery. “Really, it’s a whole new world, a whole new hydrosphere on our planet. We didn’t know it was possible to trap this amount of fluid and gas for this kind of time scale.”
