Hi cougr,
The thing as you know about water (that is not trapped and is in the meteoric ground water and in the troposphere as water vapor etc..) is it's perpetually being recycled, as part of the water cycle, so some of the water that we drink out of the tap or falls as rain could conceivably be comprised of molecules that date back to billions of years... so we are constantly dealing with water from a different geological age anyway... and even the trapped underground water here that has been labeled fossil water is still undergoing chemical changes - being underground it's still subject to heat and pressure and is still interacting within the confines of its host rocks, so it hasn't really faithfully preserved anything of its former self - for instance its salinity levels and mineral content may be much higher than when it was initially sealed off, geologically.
I don't even like the term fossil water .. but I realize that it's nevertheless a term that's got some acceptance and getting back to what I mentioned before .. what I meant was I might have somehow been persuaded to reluctantly accept νερό απολίθωμα ..seeing that απολίθωμα equates to fossil, if the initial Greek translation was heading that way, but seeing it's not and απολιθωμένο seems to be doing the rounds instead, what I said just becomes a moot point anyway.
I would have actually preferred trapped aquifer .. instead of fossil water if the choice was mine .. which would possibly translate to παγιδευμένος υδροφόρος ορίζοντας ! ,, but my fall back position is παγιδευμένο ορυκτό νερό , which produces no search results unfortunately.
