If you discovered billion-year-old water in a reservoir in Canada, you’d want to know everything about it, right? What it looks like, how it smells, whether it contains life. One scientist went a step further: She took a sip.
“It tastes terrible,” researcher Barbara Sherwood Lollar told the Los Angeles Times. “It is much saltier than seawater. You would definitely not want to drink this stuff.” Yet the University of Toronto Earth Science professor admits she did just that, several times.
“We are interested in the saltiest waters because they are the oldest, and tasting is the quick-and-dirty way to find which are the most salty,” she said. It wasn’t like drinking a glass of tap water either; this H20 went from translucent to an orangey hue once it hit the oxygen in the air, the Herald Sun reported. And it was viscous, Sherwood Lollar told the Times, like maple syrup.
According to the Nature paper about the findings, the water, which contained high levels of crucial-for-life methane and hydrogen, could be anywhere from 1 to 2.6 billion years ancient—millions of years older than the researchers expected to discover.
Now they’re looking at the liquid’s DNA fingerprints to determine whether life exists within its droplets. If it does, it could have broad implications for life on Mars, given that the red planet’s surface once held water and rocks chemically similar to those on earth, Chris Ballentine, University of Manchester geochemist, explained to Nature News. “There is no reason to think the same interconnected fluids systems do not exist there,” said Ballentine, who helped lead the research.
The scientists have their work cut out for them: Sherwood Lollar told the Times it could be a year before they see any results. In the meanwhile, let’s raise a glass to her for taking a sip in the name of science.
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