 Sometimes I sit with a glass of water in front of me and wonder about the water molecules. Where were they before? Where are they going next? How does water connect us to our environment and to each other? What does water remember? My name is Rebecca Dalgoy and I'm the Curator of Natural Resources and Industrial Technologies at Ingenium. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the new Ingenium Center. In this building, we will be able to look after the National Science and Technology collection, everything from pieces of decommissioned nuclear reactors to sewing machines. And once we are all moved in, we will be better able to make sure that this collection is accessible to Canadians, whether this means that you can come visit us in person, or that we can produce high quality 3D scans of the artifacts. But today I want to speak with you about the newest and actually the oldest addition to the collection. Though this may look like an ordinary water sample, the water in this bottle is actually a specimen of the oldest known flowing water on earth. It's mean residence time, in this case the amount of time that the water has been out of touch with the earth's surface, is more than a billion years. This puts the water in precambrian time. To give a little bit of context, dinosaurs lived during the Mesozoic Era, approximately 66 to 245 million years ago. This water has been in the earth's crust since well before the time of the dinosaurs. The water was collected in 2009 by University of Toronto Geochemists, Dr. Barbara Sherwood-Lawler and her team in the Kid Creek Mine, the deepest base metal mine in North America, near Timmins, Ontario, at approximately 2.4 kilometers below the earth's surface. Dr. Sherwood-Lawler and her team traced many lines of evidence that both investigated the water's geochemical and radiogenic fingerprints, meaning they measured the quantities of certain isotopes of noble gases, and analyzed the sulfate-reducing or rock-eating microbes that lived in the water. Looking closely at the bottle, you can easily see the yellow-looking sediment. Analysis showed that there were a variety of things in the water, including the tiny microbes I mentioned before, and the hydrogen and sulfate that these microbes ate. Though we have not opened the bottle, Dr. Sherwood-Lawler has assured us that the water smells like sulfate, and that it tastes extremely salty, as this ancient water has about three to ten times the salinity of seawater. A little over a year ago, Dr. Sherwood-Lawler approached Ingenium about a possible transfer of a sample of this water to the National Collection. In addition to the water sample, Ingenium also received the following. A field kit case, a sample of the type of rock that the chemolithotrophic, literally rock-eating microbes in the water eat, and several items that were used in the collection and analysis of the water sample, including a glove that protected a researcher's hand, a field conductivity probe that measures total salinity, and a notebook that is typical of what is used in the field, where Dr. Sherwood-Lawler and her team recorded details of sample locations, flow rates, and field measurements, such as temperature, pH, and salinity. Considering all of the elements of this acquisition lot together allows us to think about some of the ways in which we relate to water and to the natural world more broadly. What do we know? How do we learn? What are we going to do with this knowledge? In the upcoming years, we at Ingenium will endeavor to find many ways to work with different communities and publics in order to understand and interpret this water. What does it mean when the Anthropocene, the geological era in which we are currently living, that is defined by humans' impact on the environment, is confronted by a remnant of something that bears ancient witness? What messages are swirling around this tiny bottle?