Ancient water taken from Canadian mine

From online dispatches

Some of the world’s oldest water samples have been drilled from a rock in a Canadian mine, science journal Nature has reported in its most recent issue, according to the BBC.

The fluid was at least 1.5 billion years old, said U.K. and Canadian scientists, who used novel dating techniques.

The water was recovered from a depth of 2.4 kilometers where it was supposedly trapped after percolating through the ground.

The sample is undergoing some tests to determine if any types of micro-organisms have survived in the water despite the lack of a light source.

"There are similar waters in South Africa with almost identical chemistry that are tens of millions of years old, and they contain microbes that have adapted to that environment," said Professor Chris Ballentine of Manchester University.

"These are microbes that can survive on the energy from the natural water-rock interactions," he told BBC News.