This Seawater Is 20,000 Years Old, and Has Remained Untouched Since the Last Ice Age [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer | May 26, 2019 08:57am ET

Twenty thousand years ago, life on Earth was a lot cooler. It was the tail end of a 100,000-year ice age — also called the Last Glacial Maximum — and massive sheets of ice covered much of North America, Northern Europe and Asia. (If they had been around at the time, New York City, Berlin and Beijing would all have been entombed in ice.)

Scientists are used to studying this chilly spell in Earth's history by looking at things like coral fossils and seafloor sediments, but now a team of seafaring researchers may have found a piece of the past that blows all the others out of the water: an actual sample of 20,000-year-old seawater, squeezed out of an ancient rock formation from the Indian Ocean.

According to the researchers, who described the find in a study to be published in the July 2019 issue of the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, this find represents the first direct remnant of the ocean as it appeared during Earth's last ice age.

The researchers found their watery prize while drilling sediment core samples out of the underwater limestone deposits that make up the Maldives archipelago in South Asia. After hauling each core onto their research vessel, the team sliced up the rock like a tube of cookie dough and put the pieces into a hydraulic press that squeezed any remnant moisture out of the pores. [Photos: Traces of an Ancient Ice Stream]

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https://www.livescience.com/65566-ice-age-water-discovered-in-maldives.html