Scientists have found small pockets of seawater that have been trapped in rock for over 400 million years, a discovery that could help us understand how oceans evolve and adapt to changing climate conditions.
Great armored fishes, ammonoids, giant sea scorpions, and trilobites once populated the small amount of liquid waters.
The smallest remnants of ancient seas are thought to be the oldest water samples.
The iron rocks in upstate New York were spotted by a research team looking into the issue of toxic arsenic leaking out of rocks.
They noticed that there were defects in the form of spherical clusters of small crystals.
"We looked at these samples through the electron microscope, and we saw these kind of mini bubbles or mini features within the Framboid, and we wondered what they were."
In order to confirm that the water trapped in the rocks was salt water, a combination of atom probe tomography and mass spectrometry techniques was used.
The researchers were able to see the conditions under which the deposits formed.
The sea would have stretched from where Michigan is today to Ontario in Canada. The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is the largest reef in the world, with trilobite-like creatures and early types of horseshoe crabs.
It's not uncommon for minerals and gems to hold trapped liquids, but they can't be analyzed on a small scale. The scientists have demonstrated a similar technique to the one used for rock salt, which is much more plentiful.
"Salt deposits from trapped seawater are relatively rare in the rock record, so there are millions of years missing in the records and what we currently know is based on a few localities where there is halite found," says Daniel Gregory.
For hundreds of millions of years, the climate changed and dried up the inland sea, trapping the fossils in its silt and turning them into the rocks that are today's scuplture.
Researchers intend to learn more about how the ocean handled rising temperatures, which should give an indication of how a similar scenario would play out today.
The techniques will be used to understand how hydrogen interacts with rocks. Hydrogen can be used as a low-carbon fuel source if it can be safely stored and retrieved.
By using this technique, we could figure out what's going on at the atomic level, which would then help in evaluating andOptimizing strategies for hydrogen storage in the subsurface
The research was published in two journals.
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