2024-01-20 07:36:07
Researchers have found 60 million-year-old water under the Highlane Mountains in Sicily, part of Italy, a European country. The origin of this water is related to the environmental event called Messinian salinity crisis. At that time, the Mediterranean Sea dried up along the coasts and the sea level rose as a result. With this, the seabed came into contact with the atmosphere. According to the study, the water from the rain that fell that day was drained and went down from the seabed.
The research results were published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment. Researchers say that this water spread over an area of two and a half kilometers under the Hyblaine mountains in southern Sicily. It is still here. But Italy is not home to the world’s oldest aquifer ever discovered. Rather it is in Canada.
It was found in Kidd Creek, located in Ontario, Canada. Scientists hoped that it would provide information regarding life on Mars. The water was discovered in 2009 by Barbara Lawlor, a geologist at the University of Toronto. As early as 1992, they visited the Kidd Creek mine, but were unable to find it. But on a visit 17 years later, this water caught Lawler’s attention. It was located at a depth of regarding three kilometers from the ground level in the mine.
Its age was estimated when samples of the water, which smelled like burning the nose, were sent to labs for testing. The water was full of dissolved chemicals.
This primordial water is ten times saltier than sea water. But even in these conditions, it was later shown that micro-organisms called chemolithotropic bacteria were able to live in this primordial water. They live by eating nitrogen and sulfate compounds in the water.
Conditions here bear a strong resemblance to subsurface conditions on Mars. Scientists at that time hoped that if life might survive in the water filled with chemicals two and a half kilometers below the surface of the red planet, life might also be found in the water on the red planet’s surface.
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