Water discovered deep in Earth’s crust may harbor life

BBC : Some of the oldest water on Earth has been discovered about 2.4 km below Earth’s surface, in a deep mine in Canada. Thought to be between 1 billion and 2.5 billion years old, the water appears to be reacting with the surrounding rock to produce hydrogen, a potential food source for living organisms. Not only was the age of the water surprising but also the fact that there is so much of it—more than all the world’s rivers, swamps, and lakes combined, according to a study published in Nature. As a result, global hydrogen production in the continental crust may be much higher than previously estimated. “It gives us a quantum change in our understanding of how much of the Earth’s crust might indeed be habitable and have enough energy to sustain subsurface life,” said Barbara Sherwood Lollar of the University of Toronto in Canada, one of the authors of the study.