390-million-year-old water bubbles found in New York rocks

These tiny remnants of ancient water remember large armored fish, ammonites and giant sea scorpions. science alert.

Scientists have discovered small pockets of water that have been locked up in rocks for over 390 million years. This is not the oldest water sample that scientists have found. However, it is believed that these are the smallest remnants of the ancient seas.

Hidden ancient sea water was once home to large armored fish and giant sea scorpions. Scientists discovered it in iron pyrite rocks in upstate New York while researching the leaching of toxic arsenic from rocks.

Sandra Taylor, a geochemist at the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), shared her memories. While studying the rocks, they noticed tiny defects in the form of spherical clusters of pyrite crystals.

Researchers have used various methods to confirm that the liquid contained in the ancient rocks was actually salt water. That is, it corresponded to the profile of the ancient inland sea.

Framboid deposits were less than 10 micrometers in size

This makes them the smallest remnants of ancient seas ever explored. Even this small amount of water was enough to understand that it belongs to the Middle Devonian period. So scientists received another proof that almost 400 million years ago, in the territory of modern Michigan and up to Ontario in Canada, an ancient inland sea extended.

Perhaps its reef could compete in size with the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

Note that minerals and gemstones often contain trapped fluids. But they can rarely be analyzed at the nanoscale. For discoveries of this kind, rock salt or halite is usually needed. Now, however, scientists have found a similar method for pyrite.

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The new find will help scientists understand how the ancient climate changed, which dried up the inland sea. And how the ocean has dealt with rising temperatures in the past. This will give an understanding of how we should adjust the program to combat global warming of the Earth.

The researchers also plan to use these techniques to better understand how hydrogen interacts with rocks. Safe storage and retrieval of large amounts of hydrogen from underground reservoirs is a strategy under study to use the element as a low-carbon fuel source.

“Using this method, we could find out what is going on at the atomic level. This would help in evaluating and optimizing underground hydrogen storage strategies,” says Taylor.