Two Billion Year Old Water Discovery Has Interesting Origins of Life Implications

December 26, 2016 – Canada holds the current record for the oldest water discovered on Earth. Well not on the Earth but rather under it. Miners working in Northern Ontario go deep into the ground to extract gold, silver, nickel, cobalt and other materials. At the Kidd Creek Mine in Timmins, Ontario, they have drilled deep into the Canadian Shield and have found water seeping from seams in the rock that has now been dated to be 2 billion years old. Three kilometers (1.8 miles) beneath the surface the water is a half-billion years older than the previous record holder which was also discovered at Kidd Creek.

The discovery was published in Nature Letters in May and presented at the American Geophysical Union‘s fall meeting in San Francisco two weeks ago. The water found is high in sulfates and although no life was observed in it, we know it could support life since we have found a dynamic sulfate-based ecosystem today near deep ocean thermal vents which we call smokers (see picture below).

How do we know the water is 2 billion years old? By measuring the ratio of dissolved noble gases in the liquid and matching them to our knowledge of Earth’s early atmosphere. In this case the proportions of helium, neon, argon and xenon contained in the fluid aligned with the primordial Earth 2 billion years in the past.

This water has been isolated for a very long time. So one wonders why the research scientists who found it would consider tasting a sample. Well they did and Barbara Sherwood Lollar of the University of Toronto’s Department of Earth Sciences reports that the sample was “very salty and bitter, much saltier than seawater.”

Speculation about the origin of life on Earth points to sulfur-based life forms emerging before the life we find in abundance on the planet today. The oldest fossils on record dating back 3.4 billion years are in fact sulfur-based. So in the absence of oxygen it is becoming far more likely that life started in water akin to that discovered in the Kidd Creek Mine, life that breathed in sulfur and not oxygen or carbon dioxide.

Postscript

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• Scientists think they’ve found the world’s oldest water – and it’s at least 2 billion years old