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University of Toronto scientists say they managed to find perhaps the oldest water on Earth. The find was made in one from old copper mines near the city of Timmins in the province Ontario. Surprisingly, this water, despite the age of two billion years, you can still drink, although experts are not recommend doing this. Researchers hope their discovery will answer some questions regarding life on Mars.
Professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar and her colleagues discovered life-giving moisture at a depth of three kilometers below the surface land. Lollar says: “A lot of chemical elements, including heavy metals and salts. Similar composition allows water to support the life of a few bacteria in such Far from sunlight. This fluid has an unpleasant smell, yellowish, increased viscosity and salinity at ten times greater than that of sea water. You do not get poisoned if you do a couple of sips, but the taste of this “drink”, to put it mildly, is not like it. ”
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Experts suggest that their find will be able to talk about the birth of life not only on Earth, but also on the Red Planet. “If there is water in the earth’s crust that can sustain microorganisms and provide them with energy, it is possible that something similar can occur beneath the surface of Mars. there is the opinion that the Martian bowels generally conceal a huge ocean, which teeming with life, “says Oliver Warr, another member research team.
It is noteworthy that in 2013 Canadian scientists have already examined this mine and found in it water samples up to a billion years old. Now they were lucky to discover a source in which water was already hundreds of millions of years before the first dinosaurs. “We can say that this is a kind of temporary capsule with a message to descendants, which contains geochemical data “, – said Lollar, who has been working in this field for over twenty years.
A photo from open sources
Interestingly, several generations of local miners were well aware of the existence of this source. Also in the eighties of the nineteenth century began to notice yellow foul-smelling liquid that occasionally appeared from under land. Superstitious miners called her “piss of the devil” and tried to bypass, not even suspecting how much this fetid water is valuable to science.
Water Life Mars
