1.2 billion-year-old groundwater is some of the oldest on Earth
Groundwater that was recently discovered deep underground in a mine in South Africa is estimated to be 1.2 billion years old. Researchers suspect that the groundwater is some of the oldest on the planet, and its chemical interactions with the surrounding rock could offer new insights about energy production and storage in Earth's crust.
In fact, Oliver Warr, a research associate in the department of Earth sciences at the University of Toronto in Canada and lead author of a new study about the groundwater discovery, described the location in a statement as a "Pandora's box of helium-and-hydrogen-producing power."
The South African groundwater was also enriched in the highest concentration of radiogenic products — elements produced by radioactivity — yet discovered in fluids, according to the study, demonstrating that ancient groundwater sites may one day potentially serve as energy sources. ...
The gold and uranium mine, known as Moab Khotsong, sits about 100 miles (161 kilometers) southwest of Johannesburg and is home to one of the world's deepest mine shafts, plunging to depths of 1.86 miles (3 km) below the surface at its deepest ...
The new find follows the prior discovery of approximately 1.8 billion-year-old groundwater made during a 2013 research expedition (also led by Warr). That finding occurred at Kidd Creek Mine in Ontario, which lies beneath the Canadian Shield, a geologic structure comprised of igneous and metamorphic rock dating to the precambrian supereon (4.5 billion to 541 million years ago). The Canadian Shield spans 3 million square miles (nearly 8 million square km), and Warr referred to it as a "hidden hydrogeosphere" — an abundance of hydrogen ...
"One of the most exciting parts about this new discovery is that at first we thought the groundwater at Kidd Creek was an outlier," Warr told Live Science. "But now we have this brand-new site located somewhere different with a completely different geologic history that also preserves fluid on a billion-year timescale. It looks like this is a feature of these environments, which represent about 72% of the total continental crust by surface area." ...
