The billion-year-old water might help unlock one of humanity’s biggest unanswered questions: Could there be life on other planets?
When Barbara Sherwood Lollar sent water samples to a colleague at the University of Oxford for testing, she knew this was no ordinary water. The geochemist had spent much of her career wandering around some of the deepest mines in the world, finding and extracting water that was millions of years old. She waited and waited for results that should’ve come back promptly. So she dialled up the U.K. researcher in charge of the test. “I said, ‘Hey, what’s going on with the samples?’ ” she recalls. “He said, ‘Our mass spectrometer is broken. This can’t be right.’ ” The tests pegged the mean age of the samples, extracted from a mine north of Timmins, Ont., in 2009, at 1.6 billion years old—the oldest ever found on Earth.
Sherwood Lollar, the Canada Research Chair in Isotope Geochemistry of the Earth and the Environment at the University of Toronto, says the ancient water might help answer a question that curious earthlings have asked as long as we’ve peered skyward: could there be life on other planets?
The billion-year-old liquid’s dead giveaway is its musty smell. “It literally is following your nose right up to the rock, to find the crack or the fractures where the water is discharging,” says Sherwood Lollar. But locating the highly saline fluid—up to 10 times saltier than sea water—requires more than a gifted schnozz. Sherwood Lollar first visited the Glencore-owned Kidd Creek mine north of Timmins in 1992. Seventeen years later, on an expedition that took her 2.4 km underground, her team finally extracted the record-setting brine. Four years and countless tests later, the team settled on the billion-year
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