Barbara Sherwood Lollar, a geologist from Canada, has been credited with discovering the world’s oldest water resource which was analysed from a sample taken from a mine in Canada.
Barbara had first visited the Glencore-owned Kidd Creek mine in 1992 and took a team there 17 years later, on an expedition that would help her make a landmark discovery. Her team extracted this record-setting brine over 2.4 km underground and after four years of tedious research, they found out that this was older than any water sample ever found.
Barbara then promptly send this sample to Oxford University. 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. This is by far the oldest water sample ever found on the surface of Earth. Finding the water per se was not the biggest discovery, since tiny chemolithotrophic microorganisms were found feasting on the hydrogen present in this water. This was the actual landmark of the discovery since it raised questions about whether life could exist beyond Earth.
Sherwood Lollar added that Glencore set aside space for another superlative feature inside the mine; it was one of the deepest and longest scientific observatories for fluids and deep microbiology in the world.
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