Ancient water from Ontario mine may hold clues to earliest lifeforms on Earth and life on Mars

Deep in a northern Ontario mine, scientists have discovered a reservoir of the oldest known free-flowing water on the planet, and their findings may provide clues to how life may exist now on Mars and similar planets orbiting other stars.

Earlier this year there were reports of scientists drilling deep into the Antarctic glaciers to reach a lake buried under the ice for millions of years, hoping to find signs of life in that water. Well, a group of scientists working on the other end of the world have been using rock, instead of ice, as their medium of choice, and drilling down from over 2 kilometres below the surface, they believe they have found water that has been isolated from the Earth's atmosphere and the rest of the water on the planet for between 1.5 and 2.64 billion years. This would make it the oldest water yet found, and from a time before there were multicellular forms of life on the planet.

[ Related: World's oldest flowing water found deep in Timmins mine ]

"We've found an interconnected fluid system in the deep Canadian crystalline basement that is billions of years old, and capable of supporting life," said University of Manchester professor of geochemistry Chris Ballentine, in a statement. "Our finding is of huge interest to researchers who want to understand how microbes evolve in isolation, and is central to the whole question of the origin of life, the sustainability of life, and life in extreme environments and on other planets."

This water was found in pockets below the Kidd Mine, the world's deepest copper and zinc mine, near Timmins, Ontario, by a team of Canadian and British scientists.

The scientists carefully extracted the water from boreholes, preventing it from coming into contact with the air in the mine, so that they could test it for dissolved gases and any possible microorganisms that might be living in it. Their results so far show that the water has enough methane and hydrogen gases dissolved in it, that it would have been perfect for supporting primitive life forms, but the tests to see if it actually holds samples of that life now are still to come.

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"Our Canadian colleagues are trying to find out if the water contains life right now," said Lancaster University lecturer Dr. Greg Holland, the lead author of the study, in the statement. "What we can be sure of is that we have identified a way in which planets can create and preserve an environment friendly to microbial life for billions of years. This is regardless of how inhospitable the surface might be, opening up the possibility of similar environments in the subsurface of Mars."

The study, published in the journal Nature today, was written by Holland and Ballentine, Barbara Sherwood Lollar and Georges Lacrampe-Couloume from the University of Toronto, Greg Slater at McMaster University in Hamilton and Long Li, from the University of Alberta.

(Photo courtesy: LiveScience/Holland et al)

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