Apr 27, 2021 11:23 PM
https://www.macleans.ca/society/science/...dian-mine/
EXCERPTS: . . . 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-plus figure.
[...] The Precambrian Canadian Shield that stores vast mineral deposits is 2.7 billion years old, and once formed an ocean floor. What was once horizontal is now vertical, and the rock walls on the ride down the ramp offer a tour of an ancient seabed, preserved for thousands of millennia. The Earth’s surface is in constant flux, and its oldest existing ocean floor dates back only a few hundred million years. The undisturbed Shield is now Earth’s closest analogue to the subsurface of Mars, which never succumbed to the churning forces of plate tectonics. If water can breed life far beneath Timmins, there’s a chance the same is true on the Red Planet. No one will know for sure until they take a closer look... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: . . . 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-plus figure.
[...] The Precambrian Canadian Shield that stores vast mineral deposits is 2.7 billion years old, and once formed an ocean floor. What was once horizontal is now vertical, and the rock walls on the ride down the ramp offer a tour of an ancient seabed, preserved for thousands of millennia. The Earth’s surface is in constant flux, and its oldest existing ocean floor dates back only a few hundred million years. The undisturbed Shield is now Earth’s closest analogue to the subsurface of Mars, which never succumbed to the churning forces of plate tectonics. If water can breed life far beneath Timmins, there’s a chance the same is true on the Red Planet. No one will know for sure until they take a closer look... (MORE - details)
