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World’s Oldest Water Gets Even Older

posted by martyb on Friday December 16 2016, @02:26PM   
from the just-a-mattter-of-time dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

The world’s oldest water, which is locked deep within the Earth’s crust, just got even older.

The liquid was discovered deep down in a mine in Canada in 2013 and is about 1.5 billion years old.

But now, at the same site, University of Toronto scientists have found a deeper source of water that is at least 500 million years more ancient.

The work was presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

Professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar, who led the team that made the discovery, told BBC News: “When people think about this water they assume it must be some tiny amount of water trapped within the rock.

“But in fact it’s very much bubbling right up out at you. These things are flowing at rates of litres per minute - the volume of the water is much larger than anyone anticipated.”

In your face, Peru!

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Original Submission

• What does it mean for water to be “old”? What does it mean for water to be “old”? (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @03:16PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @03:16PM (#442062)

  I can’t find a clear answer for what they mean by this FTFA, but a different article on the same topic seems to explain things a bit more: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/water-billion-timmins-oldest-1.3898740 [www.cbc.ca]

  It seems that it isn’t so much referring to the age of the water but more the age of the rock strata where the water was discovered, and the chemicals in the water told them how old it was, which tells us what the conditions of the planet were like back then. It seems rather that most of the water in the world today is actually older than the Solar System itself, coming from primordial interstellar ice that was around even before the sun became a star.

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• Re:What does it mean for water to be “old”? (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @04:45PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @04:45PM (#442092)

  Obviously. Idiot. Ass.

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• Re:What does it mean for water to be “old”? Re:What does it mean for water to be “old”? (Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday December 16 2016, @10:16PM

  by Immerman (3985) on Friday December 16 2016, @10:16PM (#442245)

  Umm, considering how chemically and biologically active water is, and that both aspects involve chemical reactions which cause the component atoms to cease to be water, it seems rather likely that the atoms in any given water molecule that's been ecologically accessible has been something other than water at least a few times in the Earth's history.

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  • Re:What does it mean for water to be “old”? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @11:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16 2016, @11:55PM (#442284)

    Unfortunately, there's essentially no easy way to tell when the last time any bit of water was broken and reformed in some chemical reaction, so I doubt that's what the article is talking about when it talks about how old the water is.

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