Scientist discovers the oldest water on Earth and drinks it

A scientist who discovered the oldest water ever found on Earth decided that the best thing to do was, of course, to drink it.

Professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar was leading a team of geologists studying a Canadian mine in 2016 when she made the extraordinary discovery.

The water flowing about three kilometers beneath the surface was estimated to be between 1.5 and 2.6 billion years old, according to tests, making it the oldest water ever found on Earth.

“When people think about this water, they assume it must be a small amount trapped inside the rock,” said Prof. Sherwood Lollar.

“But in fact, the water is bubbling up a lot, right in your direction. These things flow at liters per minute – the volume of water is much greater than expected.”

After tasting the ancient water, she found it was “very salty and bitter” and “much saltier than seawater.”

This was an encouraging sign, because saltier water tends to be older. In this case, where the water has aged for billions of years, that is not surprising at all.

“If you are a geologist working with rocks, you have probably licked many rocks,” Sherwood Lollar said.

Her team also discovered that life once existed in the water by analyzing sulfate – the salt compounds in it.

“We were able to show that the signals we see in the fluids must have been produced by microbiology – and most importantly, produced over a very long period of time.”

“The microbes that produced this signature could not have done it overnight.”

“This must be an indicator that organisms have been present in these fluids over a geological timescale.”

Fortunately, the scientist did not experience any terrible reaction like in a sci-fi movie when she drank the ancient water and lived to tell the story.

“KORÇA BOOM”