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The researchers have yet to find microbes living in the water, but Sherwood Lollar says the ancient fluids “certainly look habitable.” They expect to know for certain with in a year.

Meanwhile, the scientists say it’s time to rethink which parts of Earth — and planets like Mars — are fit for life.

“We are just slowly beginning to understand that in fact we are looking at a whole new hydrosphere on the planet,” Sherwood Lollar said in an interview. She said it appears several regions on Earth contain ancient isolated water in geological formations below the surface.

They are not underground lakes, she says, but more like veins of water that run through fractures in the rocks.

In 2006, Sherwood Lollar and her colleagues found microbes eking out an existence in saline waters 2.8 km below the surface in South African gold mines. That water had been cut off from the surface for tens of millions of years.

That work led the researchers to northern Ontario and the discovery of the much older water. It flows out of fractures and bore holes in a mine 2.4 kilometres below the surface. Sherwood Lollar declined to the name of the copper-zinc mine near Timmins involved in the project out of what she called “courtesy” to the company.

“The miners first tipped us to it,” says Sherwood Lollar, noting how records of “really saline water” in Canadian mines date back to the 1880s. “It had completely flown under the radar of the science community.”

The team collected samples of the water , which flows out of one fracture at the rate of almost two litres a minute, and took them back to the lab for analysis.