Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
The purest water in the world, bubbling up to the surface between Waverley and Elmvale, will be featured on TVO's The Water Brothers episodes Thursday and Sunday nights. The episode entitled 'The World's Oldest Water' has hosts Tyler and Alex Mifflin looking into not only the oldest water in the world found near Timmins, but also the purest water and that's right here in north Simcoe.
Although most of us would gag at the thought of drinking water that’s been left sitting out for days on end unless we were desperate, the same can’t be said for the scientists involved in an incredible study. In 2013, scientists from the University of Toronto discovered the water over 1.5 miles beneath Earth’s surface, left isolated from the outside world for millennia in Timmins, Ontario, Canada. Most people would probably agree that this isn't a liquid for drinking, and is between 1.5 billion and 2.6 billion years old. But apparently professor Barbara Sherwood Lollar isn't most people. As lead researcher, Lollar tried the water and herself and judging by her reaction, it tasted just as nasty as it sounds.
Canada Nickel Company Inc. has announced it will submit its Crawford Nickel Project north of Timmins, Ont. to the federal Impact Assessment permitting process. The decision follows the acceptance by the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada of the company’s Initial Project Description of the project, stated a release. The Crawford project is expected to be among the top five largest nickel sulphide operations in the world, supplying nickel to manufacturers of stainless steel and electric vehicle batteries. The process would involve open pit mining at a site 42 kilometres north of Timmins in the Timmins-Cochrane Mining Camp of northeastern Ontario.
When Barbara Sherwood Lollar sent water samples to a colleague at the University of Oxford for testing, she knew this was no ordinary water. The geochemist had spent much of her career wandering around some of the deepest mines in the world, finding and extracting water that was millions of years old. She waited and waited for results that should’ve come back promptly. So she dialled up the U.K. researcher in charge of the test. “I said, ‘Hey, what’s going on with the samples?’ ” she recalls. “He said, ‘Our mass spectrometer is broken. This can’t be right.’ ” The tests pegged the mean age of the samples, extracted from a mine north of Timmins, Ont., in 2009, at 1.6 billion years old—the oldest ever found on Earth.
Life found in ancient water flowing through a northern Ontario mine could eventually help scientists unlock the mystery about whether there was ever life on Mars, according to a scientist at the University of Toronto. Barbara Sherwood Lollar, a professor of geochemistry, led a team of researchers at the Kidd Creek mine north of Timmins, Ont. that extracted the oldest sample of water ever found – almost 2 billion years old – from 2.4 kilometres underground.
