Scientists have discovered pockets of seawater trapped in rock for over 390 million year. This discovery could help us to understand how the oceans adapt to changing climates.
The small amounts of liquid in the pictures represent water that was once inhabited. Great armored fishesAmmonoids, giant sea-scorpions, and trilobites.
However, it is not The oldest waterSample on record suggests that these are the smallest remains of ancient seas ever discovered.
Hidden seawater was found in iron pyrite rock in upstate New York. It was discovered by a research team looking into an environmental problem: toxic arsenic being leaked out of rocks.
The researchers also discovered tiny flaws in the form of tiny clusters of pyrite crystals. Framboids.
“We first looked at the samples through an electron microscope. We saw tiny bubbles or features in the framboid, and we wondered what they were.” says geochemist Sandra TaylorSubmitted by the US Department of Energy Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Washington State.
The combination of atom probe technology and mass spectrometry was used. Laser pulses and electron beams were controlled to ionize atoms. This confirms that the rock water contained in it was indeed saltwater and matches the chemical profile of the area’s ancient sea.
Researchers were able to infer from the tiny size of the framboid deposit, which is less than 10 micrometers, the conditions that they formed.
During the Middle DevonianThis sea would have extended from Michigan to Ontario in Canada, nearly 400 million years ago. Its reef would have been comparable to the Great Barrier Reef in AustraliaIt is large, and home to trilobite-like creatures as well as the oldest types of horseshoe crawls.
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Although it is not unusual for gems and minerals to contain trapped liquids, they are rarely able to be analysed on a nanoscale. This type of discovery is normally made using rock salt or halite. But scientists now have a similar method for pyrite. It is far more abundant.
“Salt deposits from trapped oceanwater are very rare in rock records, so millions of years are missing in the records. What we currently know is based only on a few locations where halite is found.” says geochemist Daniel GregoryFrom the University of Toronto, Canada.
Slowly, however, the climate changed and dried out the inland sea. As a result, fossils within the sediment became the pyrite stones that were collected in this research hundreds, of millions of years later.
The researchers plan to continue studying these mineral deposits in order to gain more information about the ocean’s ability to handle rising temperatures. This should provide an indication of how a similar scenario could play out today.
They also plan to apply the techniques to improve our understanding of how hydrogen interacts and interacts with rocks. The possibility of safely storing large quantities of hydrogen underground is being investigated in order to make it a low-carbon fuel source.
Taylor said, “By using that technique we could find out what’s occurring at the Atom Level. This would then be used to evaluate and optimize strategies for hydrogen storage within the subsurface.” Says.
The research has been published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
