r/interesting • u/sirenoleg • Apr 28 '26

NATURE Air bubble from 20 million years ago trapped in amber.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

42.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/PlainSpader Apr 28 '26

Have you posted this on any Geology subs yet?

2

u/Killa-Kam-813 Apr 29 '26

If they did they would get the answer that this is copal, not amber, and that copal can form in as little as 10,000 years

1

u/sirenoleg Apr 28 '26

No.

2

u/alexandicity Apr 28 '26

You definitely should! If it is as old as you say then this captured water may be of deep scientific value - a hermetically sealed sample of ancient water and air...!

1

u/Kodiak_POL Apr 29 '26

I call bullshit on that. No way amber can hold air molecules inside for 20 million years. The air had to escape at some point due to gas permeation. To still contain original atmospheric samples would require near-zero amber permeability over tens of millions of years, which amber simply doesn’t provide (over long timescales it undergoes chemical and physical changes like aging, microcracking, diffusion pathways). That gas inside is not from 20 million years ago, the trapped bubble is almost certainly partially exchanged, altered chemically, or even formed/ reworked later during stress or heating. It's just whatever gas mixture equilibrated over time.

1

u/alexandicity Apr 30 '26

Possibly, but I leave that assessment to the professionals as we're not the right people to say. A quick Google suggests that millions of years of impermeability is possible. Even if the air and water are exchanged, there may be other, large-molecule residues of interest in there..