A pocket of water older than multicellular life has been discovered in a mine 2.4 kilometres below the Earth's surface in the city of Timmins in Ontario, Canada.
In a reminder of how priveledged we are to live in this age of scientific discovery, the water is between 1.5 and 2.6 billion years old, and it has geoscientist Barbara Sherwood Lollar and her colleagues from the University of Toronto who made the discovery excited.
"It was absolutely mind-blowing," she said.
The discovery came about thanks to the human thirst for money more than the human thirst for knowledge.
"As the prices of copper, zinc and gold have gone up, mines now go deeper, which has helped our search for long-isolated reservoirs of water hidden underground," Sherwood Lollar said.
The ancient resivoir raises the possibility that life might be found deep underground. Water can flow into fractures in rocks and become isolated deep in the crust for many years, serving as a time capsule of what their environments were like at the time they were sealed off, and by analyzing the ratios of gases seen in this water, the researchers could deduce it's age.
The water poured out of the boreholes the team drilled in the mine at the rate of nearly 2 liters per minute. It remains uncertain precisely how large this reservoir of water is.
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