Scientists Announce Enormous Amount of Water on Mars
Scientists say the appearance of water gives new hope for finding life on Mars. According to calculations, liquid located in the ocean at a depth of 1-2 km may be frozen at a depth of up to 20 km under the surface of the Red Planet.
Researchers have said that there may be vast amounts of water deep within the crust of Mars, raising new questions about the possibility of life on the red planet, The Guardian reports.
Scientists say that more than 3 billion years ago, Mars had not only lakes and rivers on its surface, but also oceans, but when the planet lost its atmosphere, these bodies disappeared. All that can be seen today is permafrost at the planet's poles, The Guardian reports.
While some of the water is thought to have been lost to space, research has shown that this is not the whole story and that the water may have been embedded in minerals, buried as ice or even existed as a liquid deep within the Earth's crust.
Now, scientists say their calculations show that vast amounts of liquid water are trapped in rocks about 7 to 12 miles (11.5 to 20 km) below the surface of Mars.
«Our estimate of liquid water exceeds the amounts of water that may have filled ancient Martian oceans,» said Dr. Vashan Wright, a co-author of the study from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.
In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr Wright and his colleagues report how they made calculations based on gravity data on Mars and measurements taken by NASA's InSight lander that show how the speed of seismic waves generated by Marsquakes and meteorite impacts varies with depth in the Red Planet's crust.
“The middle crust, where the rocks are cracked and filled with liquid water, best explains both the seismic and gravity data,” Wright said.
Dr Wright added that if the Insight measurements were representative of the entire planet, the amount of water trapped in the cracks in the rocks would fill an ocean on Mars 1-2 km deep.
“On Earth, groundwater seeped from the surface, and we expect that process to have happened on Mars as well,” the scientist said. “The infiltration must have occurred at a time when the upper crust was warmer than it is today.”
While the results do not rule out the possibility that water was also lost to space or trapped in minerals, Wright said the work allowed scientists to reassess the relative contributions of these different mechanisms to past water loss from the Martian surface.
The study also raises a tantalising possibility, The Guardian points out. “The presence of water doesn’t mean there’s life there, but water is thought to be an important component of life,” Wright said. “We know that life can exist in the deep interior of the Earth where there’s water. The middle crust of Mars, at least, contains a key component for habitability and life as we know it.”
Bethany Ellmann, a professor of planetary science at the Keck Institute for Space Studies who was not involved in the work, said a definitive measurement was now needed to show whether Mars has deep liquid water and, if so, where it is.
«On Earth, where there is liquid water, there is life, so if there are liquid water aquifers on Mars now, they are a prime target in the search for life,» she added.
Dr John Wade, from Oxford University, said he would not be surprised to see life on Mars. “Mars would have been as hospitable to simple life as Earth, if not more so, in its early history,” he said.
Dr Stephen Banham, of Imperial College London, added that finding liquid water in the mid-crust would also help geophysicists and geologists understand Mars’s internal structure and behaviour.
However, Banham was skeptical that such water would be a resource for crewed missions to Mars.
“Yes, the amount of water in the planet’s crust is potentially huge, but it would be difficult to access or use,” he said. “It may not be of much use to human exploration, at least initially.”
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