Nearly three kilometres beneath a Canadian mine, geologists found water that may have been isolated in the rock for roughly two billion years — older than animals, plants and almost everything we think of as complex life. The brine was so salty and bitter that, when one researcher tasted it, she was sampling a flavour shaped by a world humans never knew

Nearly three kilometres beneath a Canadian mine, geologists found water that may have been isolated in the rock for roughly two billion years — older than animals, plants and almost everything we think of as complex life. The brine was so salty and bitter that, when one researcher tasted it, she was sampling a flavour shaped by a world humans never knew

body.single-post h1.entry-title,body.single-post .entry-title{text-transform:none!important;} The water did not look like a message from deep time. It came from cracks in rock nearly three kilometres below the surface of a Canadian mine, in a place built for extracting ore rather than imagining the early Earth. But chemically, it belonged to a world almost impossible to picture. In the Kidd Creek mine system near Timmins, Ontario, geologists fou…