NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
Ancient remnants of long-extinct alien life are all NASA can hope for on the parched Martian surface. But any sizeable source of liquid water, like these potential underground reservoirs, is a place to check for active microbial life — even though water 10 miles underground would never see the light of day.
“It’s certainly true on Earth — deep, deep mines host life, the bottom of the ocean hosts life. We haven’t found any evidence for life on Mars, but at least we have identified a place that should, in principle, be able to sustain life,” Michael Manga, a co-author of the study and planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a press release.
Marsquakes helped NASA find water clues
When NASA put a seismometer on Mars, aboard its InSight lander, the goal was to peer into the planet’s interior.
James Tuttle Keane and Aaron Rodriquez, courtesy of Scripps Institute of Oceanograph
A clue in a Mars mystery
In addition to being downright fascinating and potentially overturning humanity’s conception of Mars as a lifeless, dry red rock, the new findings may help solve one of the planet’s greatest mysteries: where all the water went.
Mars’s surface was once lush with water. Heck, the Perseverance rover is exploring a basin that used to be a giant lake and river delta.
But the planet didn’t have a strong magnetic field, like Earth’s, to help it hold onto its atmosphere. As a result, the sun’s radiation wore away what little protective layer of atmospheric gases existed, and the planet dried up.
By about 3 billion years ago, all the water was gone. Some of it is still frozen in Mars’s ice caps. Perhaps some simply vaporized in the harsh space environment. But scientists haven’t really figured out where it all went.
The new findings suggest some of the water seeped deep into the planet’s crust.