How Old is Water?

By Ellis Hamm, Environmental Education Coordinator

June 3, 2026

How old is water? That’s the question I started researching when I began preparing to speak in chapel at an elementary/middle school here in Winnipeg a few weeks ago. 

I learned a lot of things. Firstly I was surprised to discover that the creation story in Genesis that I had read so many times, starts, not with nothingness, but with water. “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters.” (Gen 1:1-2, CEB) The first three of six days (half!) of creation all center around water in one way or another. 

Water is pretty special, but that’s easy to forget in a world where we can interact with so much of it so easily. It turns out, though, that figuring out the age of water is a very complicated question. I found a few different types of answers. 

One is from a conversation with Dr. Calvin Alexander, a scientist whose area of study is specifically studying the age of groundwater, as well as the age and formation of the universe. The age of water that he was talking about was the amount of time since the water had last fallen out of the sky as rain. 

He says that when we’re looking at a river, most of the water in a river is probably between a few hours/days (depending on the last precipitation) and a few years “old”. At the same time, when we start examining water in aquifers (a fancy word for water stuck in rocks underground), the age goes up dramatically, but the range is still very wide. In some mines, notably the Soudan mine in Minnesota or the Kidd Creek mine in Ontario, the water they are studying is between 1.6 and 2.7 billion years old!

So with the falling-from-the-sky metric, we’ve got an enormous range. But there’s another way to answer this question as well, which is to think about how long ago the water molecules themselves were formed. This is not something we can measure in the same way, but we do know that our own bodies are making water all the time! I’m not talking about when we go to the bathroom, but when our bodies break down food to create energy, they also create water as a byproduct. The water in your breath? That fog you see when you exhale on mirrors and windows? That water was created out of hydrogen and oxygen atoms in your own body TODAY. On the other hand, when you dip your finger in water in the river, that water might have been formed today, or might have been cycling through the water system for billions of years—sometimes a cloud, sometimes a pond, sometimes in an animal or plant, but water all along. And the building blocks of those molecules, those oxygen and hydrogen atoms have been here since the formation of the world. When God was making and arranging and changing water as the world was being formed, God was working with the very same molecules that we are making and changing and arranging ourselves every day. 

Which means that through us, stewards of God’s good creation, God is still creating today. God started creating and never finished. What an honour it is, to be a part of a creation story as old as the earth. 

God you are the creator of all of the things in this world and in the universe.

Thank you for the beauty of your creation. 

You made the world and you keep making the world,

in big and small ways,

every day. 

Help us to remember that you have been here all along,

working in every part of the world

and in every part of creation. 

Help us to remember that you care for everything you have made. 

And help us to care for everything that you have made in turn. 

Amen. 

Featured Photo by Walker Giesbrecht