Water Isolated for Over a Billion Years Found Under Ontario 207
ananyo writes "Scientists working 2.4 kilometers below Earth's surface in a Canadian mine have tapped a source of water that has remained isolated for at least a billion years. The researchers say they do not yet know whether anything has been living in it all this time, but the water contains high levels of methane and hydrogen — the right stuff to support life. Micrometer-scale pockets in minerals billions of years old can hold water that was trapped during the minerals' formation. But no source of free-flowing water passing through interconnected cracks or pores in Earth's crust has previously been shown to have stayed isolated for more than tens of millions of years (paper abstract)."
It is time (Score:5, Funny)
If you need me, I will be in my hermetically sealed Doomsday Bunker, just in case a vicious and contagious disease emerges.
Re:It is time (Score:5, Informative)
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Damn. Out of mod points. Someone help!
Re:It is time (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It is time (Score:5, Funny)
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You are dead to me, ArcadeMan. Dead to me.
Which is the LHC equivalent of saying: you're the other muon in a Bs meson. Or something.
Re:It is time (Score:5, Funny)
That's a bunch of crap, that water can't be any older than 6,000 years old!!!
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But... it's "holy water" (Score:2)
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That's a bunch of crap, that water can't be any older than 6,000 years old!!!
No, no no ... it was created 6,000 years ago, but it is by no means beyond God's power to create billion year old water [wikipedia.org] should He so will it. Sheesh!
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/facepalm
Don't go giving creationists big ideas on how to explain away reality.
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Don't go giving creationists big ideas on how to explain away reality.
Had you bothered to followed that link, you would have noticed that creationists have been running that argument since at least 1857. "/facepalm" indeed Sara.
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There are other reasons why these reservoirs are unlikely to contain pathogens, but your reasons are wrong. One of the most frequent ways in which new diseases appear is when they jump to a species that has no defenses against them. That's because our immune system isn't all powerful, it only really protects us against variants of pathogens we actually encounter in nature.
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That's a good way to get through high school, but by the time you hit your twenties, you should be viciously digging through Wikipedia on a daily basis. At least, that's what we do nowadays. I guess that wasn't so practical back before the invention of the encyclopedia.
...and I'm guessing you know the glass thing is false and those windows are actually thicker at the bottom because the glass was spun on a wheel. Centrifugal force caused the outer edge to get thicker. You can occasionally find the work of le
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Ah, yes, because bacteriophages regularly harass mammals. Excuse me while I stare at you. It's very bold of you to make that kind of accusation with my comment history.
For a virus to transit between hosts, it needs regular access to both a stable host and a target host. It must be able to adapt to the surface receptors on the target host, it must exploit the cellular machinery in a manner that the target host does not innately defend against, and it must be able to do so without completely losing relevance
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I dug up the Rahme et al. paper on P. aeruginosa, and it would be better to describe the strains with double-virulence as hosts of two pathogens; indeed, most strains of P. aeruginosa only attack one kingdom or the other. The gene gacA is required for attacking plants, and plays no role in attacking mammals. Most of the genes that are shared between the two mechanisms are simply involved in the export of extracellular products. The same can be said of Aspergillus spp.; the major group of animal toxins produ
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The intelligent creator also provided me, a man, with nipples, so maybe some day's he is just drunk or just not
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I consider myself a "god" in the computer realm and I re-use code on a daily basis.
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Interestingly enough males can lactate [wikipedia.org] given the proper hormonal stimulation.
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Who says a disease can only attack things they co-evolve with?
A disease is just another organism. It consumes things and it creates things. If it can consume things and survive inside another organism and the things it produces cause harm, it is a disease.
What you're saying only really applies to a virus, not a bacterial infection or any other kind of parasite.
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By definition, a parasite is something that has co-evolved with its host. Occasionally you do get species-jumping, but there are limits in how far this can go before the target is just too alien for the invader to adapt to. It takes a lot of exposure and a long time for evolution to enact any drastic changes.
Simple, self-sufficient organisms like bacteria are a little more successful in exploring new environments, but their tendency to do harm is generally accidental, and requires a certain degree of metabo
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Of course any effects would be accidental.
You don't need to live long in a host to do damage. Excreting compounds inside something that has never been in contact with them before may cause undesired outcomes, like death.
Organisms at the level of bacteria don't attack. They simply feed and reproduce.
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Well, they can attack, but I don't want to give anyone nightmares. Cryptosporidium is unnerving enough as it is, and that's a well-developed metazoan.
And granted, there are bacteria that secrete toxins as a defence mechanism, but the chance of an extreme reaction is fairly small for something that has never had to defend itself against animals. The kinds of random compounds you see excreted by exotic isolated bacteria may be irritants, but they're nonspecific and don't cause all that much damage. The more s
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I hope you got it at a discount, 'cause those things can't be used, and diseases can only attack things they co-evolve with. This water is 1.5 billion years old. Plants appeared on land only 1.2 billion years ago. Animals evolved less than 700 million years ago. Just like the with Lake Vostok [slashdot.org] article from a couple of months ago, all anyone does by making that joke is showing that a meme from bad science fiction is still alive. Please stop. You're hurting yourself. This is the biology equivalent of saying the LHC makes black holes.
You understand that, in this 1950s movie, you play the role of arrogant know-it-all who gets eaten, screaming as you lean back and the camera jams your face, don't you?
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it's not like we're modifying the DNA of the food we consume purely for corporate profits
Hate to tell you, but mankind has been doing that for at least as long as horticulture and trading has been around, probably 15,000 years at the very least.
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The kind of DNA modifications we can do now are on a whole different scale than those we were capable of before the development of gene splicing.
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As Lynnwood points out, most, if not all, GM crop modifications are simply more direct ways of achieving what we've already been doing for thousands of years through plant domestication: resistance to damp, drought, heat, cold, pests, and pesticides. The biggest danger is that these improvements will transfer into weeds, nullifying the utility of herbicides. Few if any crop modifications are a threat to human health.
The real issues are about various kinds of monopolies: these modifications are patented and
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Re: It is time (Score:2)
Deep water? 1.5 billion years? And you think it's not something worrisome!?
Cthuluh, I claim, nothing but Cthuluh!
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Re:It is time (Score:5, Insightful)
No, no whoosh today—you'll recall that Slashdot users made jokes about the LHC black hole thing, too. I even used the word "joke" in my post!
The thing is, culture (especially Western culture) is full of paranoid anxieties about science. From Frankenstein to Terminator, there's always some cynical writer somewhere creating dystopias because pain sells. The longer these ideas remain embedded in culture, the more chance they have to affect public opinion. Eventually this causes a distrust in science to fester, and that's something we need to stand against if we're ever going to survive the next century. I'm generally fine with making young-earth creationism jokes (I've had more than a few myself) because people here are sufficiently well-informed to be able to recite the truth.
But after a certain point it gets worrying that the first response to "look, a glimpse into the ancient past!" is "quick, call CEDA [wikia.com]!" What experience does Sparticus789 actually have with biology? If he(?) encounters someone who genuinely believes a George Romero-style outbreak could happen at any moment, what would he say to rebuff them? Would he even have the confidence to speak up? Enough parroting of a meme can kill knowledge of the truth, and at the very least, that must be guarded against. With biology this is particularly sensitive because most people know only a very little amount about it, and yet embracing or rejecting biological research stands to affect us immensely in the future.
So +1 for speaking up, but -1 for reducing that to "whoosh."
Re:It is time (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, culture (especially Western culture) is full of paranoid anxieties about science. From Frankenstein to Terminator, there's always some cynical writer somewhere creating dystopias because pain sells. The longer these ideas remain embedded in culture, the more chance they have to affect public opinion.
Well, to be fair some dystopia novels do serve as a good hard warning. As a non-scientific political/ideological example, I present 1984, written precisely at a time when all the intelligentsia were eager to create a global socialistic (albeit not quite communist) utopia.
Same with science, really. I'll set it up to explain why:
75 years ago, scientists were handling radioactive elements like they were as harmless as lumps of play-doh, and every 'good' mother was out there bathing their kids' feet in X-rays for shoe-fitting, at dosages/levels that today would get your kids snatched away by Protective Services if they found out. Eventually, we learned about things like radiation poisoning (though TBH it took a freakin' atomic bomb or two going off before anyone outside of a few select physicists even knew what that was). In other news, during that same time period Eugenics was once considered a solid (and even respected) science... and we all know where that went. The sad part is, that's nothing compared to the almost countless examples of treating science as panacea, without an eye towards ethics or morals, or even caution.
While no, you're not going to spawn a black hole at LHC (the laws of nature are rather resilient against that, and the entire Earth hasn't enough mass to make one), there are some good, hard uses for dystopian fantasy-type warnings. Human genetics stands out as a pretty good one - while I certainly wouldn't expect a 60-foot-tall man-slaying homonculus to come out of it (hell, it wouldn't survive gestation), I can see how genetic mucking-around can open whole populations up to pathogen immunity problems** and eventual congenital defects, among other things - and I haven't even touched on the ethics of the situation.
Besides, some damned good sci-fi has come out of dystopian views of hard science, and yet somehow hasn't retarded scientific progress in spite of it.
Overall, I guess the only reason I'm defending the dystopian genre isn't because I like the topic matter (let's face it, there's a lot of crap novels out there that try to use it), but because it does serve an important watchdog function. Sure, we think we've evolved beyond superstition, but honestly? It doesn't matter how frickin' much we've evolved, because we have yet to evolve beyond human failings: greed, avarice, lust, hatred, etc. So unless your name is Mother Teresa, you suffer from these as much as I do (and she likely suffered from it too, just that she was really good at controlling them).
** note that such problems would likely require many, many generations to surface.
Re:It is time (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a fine line to walk, certainly, and that's hard to squeeze adequately into a Slashdot post. I agree with your views. Brave New World is a title that has had an immense impact on the world, much like Nineteen Eighty-Four, and these were very important resources in preventing the world from becoming unhinged at critical moments in the twentieth century. A good book can be a powerful tool—although, be wary, as books can present garbage and convoluted logic and still be just as accepted. (Annoyed glares go to War and Peace and She Who Must Not Be Named.)
My complaint is really about the influence of trash on popular culture. The Andromeda Strain, to pick a random title from a vast genre, presents a completely implausible story, but has contributed to the long-running idea that nature is out to kill us. Carl Sagan was similarly upset about the repetitiousness of fictional portrayals of aliens as hostile, if you'll recall.
As for the radium situation: I've done a bit of reading on this, and it's worth noting that the Radium Corporation actively tried to suppress information about the dangers of its products. The result was a lot of regulation, which has generally been successful in protecting health. Caution, in this case, was prevalent.
I somewhat suspect, though, that all important/successful dystopian novels have concentrated on ethical issues: people hurting each other or the environment. Fear of the world beyond us has, so far, been comparatively unproductive.
Re:It is time (Score:5, Informative)
While no, you're not going to spawn a black hole at LHC (the laws of nature are rather resilient against that, and the entire Earth hasn't enough mass to make one), there are some good, hard uses for dystopian fantasy-type warnings.
Since this thread is about dispelling common false beliefs, I feel like I should pitch in here: general relativity sets no minimum for the mass of a black hole! If you get energy density high enough, you get a black hole. Quantum mechanics does suggest a likely minimum energy (though until GR and Quantum are reconciled, it's guesswork), but that minimum is still pretty low.
The right question to ask is "can the LHC create a black hole which is a threat to anything?" and the answer is "no, black holes that small just don't last long enough to grow larger (if one was somehow created in the first place)".
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What experience does Sparticus789 actually have with biology?
I am not a biologist by any means. But I do have a strong enough understanding of science to understand that in reality, nothing will emerge from this lake that is hazardous to humans. Whatever lifeforms present in the lake will most likely be prokaryotic cells which do not have the capability of interacting the modern eukaryotic cells, since they have never had the chance to evolve into anything which has the potential to be damaging.
And as far as I am concerned, if someone is stupid enough to believe a
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I am glad—and relieved—to hear that. Just one small thing:
If people want to be educated, they can educate themselves. If they want to be stupid, they have that right too.
Many people have not been given the choice either way, because they have been subjected to stupid people so thoroughly that what glimpses of the truth they hear are incomprehensible or immediately discounted. Many young people with creationist parents are in this boat; it's only by chance that they're given an opportunity to think differently. (And this obviously applies to other subjects, too, like the entire population of North Korea. T
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The question was never whether or not it was a joke, but how conscious the author was of the implications of the statement, and whether or not the joke reflected a genuine anxiety. During the cold war, there was plenty of black humour about nuclear attacks, but few people, if any, discounted the dangers of it.
However, you do get a gold star for correctly guessing my nationality.
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That only happens in Hollywood.
Seriously, how else do you think they'd select Academy Award winners?
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Would you consider curing* cancer a superpower?
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Wow, Data was in Star Wars 3? Please either turn in your geek card or put on this red shirt.
He didn't say that Data was in Star Wars III. He said that Data was in Star Wars 3!
Of course. Since Star Wars is released in trilogies, and keeping in mind that the episode numbering uses Roman numerals, not Arabic, the obvious numbering scheme (ordered by release date, not in-universe date) is:
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Perhaps Star Wars 3 will be X, XI and XII with Star Wars 4 being VII, VIII and IX. 1 and 2 were swapped around, why won't Mickey swap 3 and 4?
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"Checkov, put on this red shirt and get down to engineering" - Kirk, Start Wars 8
Re:It is time (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, sure, it can interact with us. It can interact with us just like tree pollen does: it can bounce off, it can get washed away in a pool of mucus, it can get embedded in earwax, it can get clobbered by a macrophage and digested in a lysosome... those are all forms of interaction!
1.5 billion years ago is 1.5 billion years behind in an arms race—an arms race that is comprised entirely of exploiting vulnerabilities in a hardened enemy. This organism is not used to human physiological conditions. It is not used to the human immune system. Hell, it may even pre-date the concept of complex multicellular life. The idea that the systems could be compatible is, statistically, laughable. It is less than a rounding error.
Biology is not a horror movie, and it is not a computer. Fiction has lied to you.
Personally, I'm a fan of panspermia, but the fossil record goes back so far that what arrived on Earth would necessarily have to be extremely simple; possibly just a handful of nucleic acids (or analogous) with no envelope. Such organisms would be ridiculously delicate, and most likely destroyed instantly by RNases if they were exposed to the modern atmosphere on Earth.
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There could have been a lifeform back then that had the lethality of the plague and the transmissible abilities of the worst flus.
This is an oxymoron for most pathogens. Highly lethal diseases kill too quickly to be transmitted. Certain parasites like Malaria are capable of delaying their impact, but that is only possible because they have spent a long time co-evolving to kill mammals.
Life back then was very different to what we have now. What we could find down here could rewrite history, if anything lives.
Our evolutional timescale could be off by millions of years, we simply do not know yet. Only by digging more to find such underground structures may we ever know for sure.
Without a doubt this is a very important find, but it won't be so world-shattering that the layperson would be affected by it. We have a fairly good idea of what life was like prior to this point in time because of fossil records.
All something would need is a way to attack some very base mechanism that evolution cannot defend against and it is sorted.
Humans already have this
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The Andromeda, Strains Logic (Score:5, Funny)
That said I fully endorse your Hermetic [wikipedia.org] seal [wikipedia.org] and wish you well in your initiating our flippered friends into the alchemic ways.
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This water predates disease, it predates life on the planet, it even predates global warming.
3. Profit (Score:5, Funny)
Bottle it.
Then sell it at $50 a pop with dubious claims about health benefits.
"Billioneia Aquifer" - You can taste the years.
Re:3. Profit (Score:5, Funny)
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What, a dilution factor 2C or 4X? That won't be very potent [ritecare.com] . They'll think your'e a quack!
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$5 a bottle to make ice cubes with for use in exclusive whisky. It might sell.
Nice try.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Nice try.... (Score:5, Informative)
Where they there to see it trapped? Then how do they know!?
I see you're keeping slashdot's tradition of not reading TFA. Here's what the very short article says about that:
To date the water, the team used three lines of evidence, all based on the relative abundances of various isotopes of noble gases present in the water. The authors determined that the fluid could not have contacted Earth's atmosphere — and so been at the planet's surface — for at least 1 billion years, and possibly for as long as 2.64 billion years, not long after the rocks it flows through formed.
Re:Nice try.... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure GPP is making fun of Ken Ham's thought-stopping advice to his followers [google.com], which is supposed to immediately make "evolutionists" stop dead in their tracks, fall down on their knees, pray for forgiveness, and embrace the obvious Truth. Or something like that.
Re:Nice try.... (Score:4, Funny)
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:)
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They'll just say god made it look that old.
Re:Nice try.... (Score:5, Informative)
They looked at the decay of radioactive atoms found in the water and calculated that it had been bottled up for a long time — at least 1.5 billion years
They found that the water is rich in dissolved gases like hydrogen, methane and different forms of noble gases such as helium, neon, argon and xenon.
They say there is as much hydrogen in the water as around hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean.
Re:Nice try.... (Score:4, Informative)
You might think that comment was "skeptical" or that it demonstrates your "critical thinking" but really, it was just plain ignorant. Based on this comment, one might reasonably assume you fall in with the kind of douchetards that yell out "42! Haha!" every time a mathematical discussion takes place.
To answer your question, you might start by reading the article. It talks about isotopes and geochemistry.
Then you could do some reading at the library to find out more about isotopes and geochemistry, and why these things are interesting and important. If you want to go further, you could take an undergraduate degree in geology, where you will learn all kinds of strange and wonderful things about the Earth, and how we can know about things that occurred billions of years ago.
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You might think that comment was "skeptical" or that it demonstrates your "critical thinking" but really, it was just plain ignorant. Based on this comment, one might reasonably assume you fall in with the kind of douchetards that yell out "42! Haha!" every time a mathematical discussion takes place.
To answer your question, you might start by reading the article. It talks about isotopes and geochemistry.
Then you could do some reading at the library to find out more about isotopes and geochemistry, and why these things are interesting and important. If you want to go further, you could take an undergraduate degree in geology, where you will learn all kinds of strange and wonderful things about the Earth, and how we can know about things that occurred billions of years ago.
In his defense, he was making a joke about ignorance.
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It's a rough crowd this morning.
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I guess everyone should try to get their first cup of coffee in them before they open up /. in the morning.
Water (Score:3)
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There is water at the bottom of the ocean!
Still, finding a sample untouched for more than 1.5 Billion years is a once in a lifetime discovery.
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Same as it ever was...
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We all know (Score:2)
God put it there to rattle our belief..
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She can be a real Bitch like that sometimes
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In related news: (Score:3, Funny)
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is said to have been disappointed with the find, but he is confident that continued efforts will eventually locate valuable stores of oil and coal ...
Silurian reservoir (Score:4, Funny)
Have comics and movies taught us nothing? (Score:3)
Seriously, this is just a science-fiction disaster waiting to happen.
I, for one, welcome our new "Thing" overlords.
Still fizzy (Score:4, Funny)
Measurement exactly? (Score:3, Interesting)
How exactly is the time calculated? Does anyone know? I mean I have heard of several methods, from carbon dating to a few others, however this one is a bit exotic. It is not explained in either the article nor the paper, but only references another paper as which title seems to say potential method, which doesn't sound awfully conclusive.
They mention the encapsulating rock formations are billions of years old, and I can get behind that analysis, but it is my understanding that you can find billion year old rock in a lot of places. How does one date water? How do you know that it has been trapped all that time, and not captured at some point through various geological processes.
The paper references the African goldmine, but they used microbes, which I have to believe they haven't found yet. Something to do with levels of Xenon seems to be indicator, but what does that mean?
Anyway I remain skeptical until I see the details... however the only problem admittedly is the details might be beyond my level of comprehension... Still it would be nice to know and at least attempt to explain how this is possible.
Re:Measurement exactly? (Score:5, Informative)
It's technical [nature.com].
Okay, basically there are a bunch of noble gas isotopes (He, Ne, Ar, and Xe). Some of these are generated by radioactive decay of isotopes within the Earth, and some are not, having been generated by nuclear fusion in the stars that eventually went supernova and were subsequently swept up by gravity to form the solar system. Over geological time, the ratio between these essentially "fixed"/inherited/initial isotopic amounts in the Earth and the newer "radiogenic" isotopes changes. This can be measured in the present-day atmosphere, which amounts to a kind of time-and-geographically-averaged sample of what is currently outgassing from the entire Earth. By contrast, if you isolate/trap some of these gasses in minerals or fractures and fail to mix them with newer radiogenic sources over time, then they're going to preserve the isotopic ratios from the time that they first got trapped and last interacted with the isotopic mixture that was slowly outgassing from the Earth at the time. The change in the isotopic ratios are something you can pretty easily project backwards if you know the average composition of the Earth, which we do (based on some types of meteorites that fall here and that represent undifferentiated leftovers from the formation of the solar system). Measure the isotopic composition of the fluid sample, look along that line describing how the isotopic ratios have changed over Earth history due to known rates of decay and concentrations, and you can estimate the corresponding age of the sample. The focus in this paper is Xe isotopes, but they have data for Ne, He, and Ar as well.
This is *not* a traditional radiometric dating method, which ordinarily uses minerals, not fluids. Furthermore, for minerals it's usually fairly easy to look at the mineralogy of a sample at a microscopic scale and assess whether it is likely the system has remained closed (isolated from isotopic exchange with its surroundings) before analyzing the sample. For example, if a feldspar grain containing K has been partly altered into micas, this shows up clearly and would indicate that any result from the K/Ar method wouldn't reliably give you the age of the feldspar.
The method with the fluids is almost the reverse. If the system had not remained closed/isolated (the normal expectation), then the multiple isotopic systems shouldn't yield a similar age. They do (within measurement uncertainties), implying the bold interpretation that the fluids have indeed been isolated for that long.
An additional wrinkle is that they are analyzing fluids both from fractures and from what are called "fluid inclusions [wikipedia.org]", which are microscopic (typically 100 microns or less) pockets of fluid trapped within individual mineral grains (trapping fluids at the time the grain crystallized). Being able to compare those two types allows some additional assessment of mixing between fluids of different generations and origins (e.g., shallow crustal versus deep mantle fluids) and a host of other subtleties. Additional information is also provided by comparing to previously-published fluid analyses from other locations (South Africa and Australia) that are already known to be about the same host rock age. In any case, finding that fluid inclusions have an "ancient" isotopic signature isn't that big a deal (it means the minerals haven't been recrystallized by processes since then). The big surprise is finding that even the larger fractures seem to show the same signature rather than that of water with more modern isotopic compositions. That's amazing. And deserves some skepticism, which the authors try to address by looking at the other isotopic systems.
That's about as far as I can get with only a few paragraphs of explanation. It only scratches the surface, but I hope it helps.
Re:Measurement exactly?//flaws (Score:2)
The measurements are valid, but IIUC, the dating typically uses the assumption that ther is/was not significant radioactivity in the region.
Yet for dating of rocks, that would require that magma and lava not be radioactive. Tests on Mt. st. Helens lava, though, showed that it is.
Moreover, the oldest areas on earth are where evidence indicates at least the possibility of their having been deMeijer/Van Westrenen style georeactor explosions: the craton around the Hudson, and South Africa (specifically the Afri
But does it... (Score:5, Funny)
You probably thought I was going to ask if it ran Linux, didn't you?
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No...I was thinking you were going to ask if it would liquid cool a Linux box...
Does this help determine where our water is from? (Score:2)
Justification (Score:2)
At last a source of water that makes the price of Perrier make some sense.
Waters of Mars... I mean, Earth (Score:2)
My wife got interested in Doctor Who after me and is catching up. We just watched Waters of Mars (re-watched for me). For the non-Whovians here, the Doctor finds himself at the first Mars colony in the near future where an infestation is spreading. Something in the water supply is turning people into water-spewing alien creatures. Even one drop of their water hitting you is enough to cause the change. The source of this was water from Mars that was isolated in a glacier for quite a long time.
So you'll
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Yeah, one and a half miles deep
I don't understand your "funny" numbers. The water was found 2.8 km underground.
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Yeah, it's been pretty good for science, actually. In addition to this new discovery, another one of these deep mines in the shield made for an excellent neutrino observatory. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Ontario - Canada's fat, lazy province (Score:5, Funny)
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Thanks for the laugh.
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Ontario and Québec both have this thing called hydro-electricity, so cranking up to 23 in the winter doesn't apply.
Seriously though... 23? Are you 70 or something?
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cue Ragnarok and Wagnerian music..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rmungandr
or the Well of Urðr