Mars may have a lot more water than we thought

TAt the time, Earth may not have been the only garden planet in the solar system. For its first billion years, Mars was partially covered in water, as the dry ocean basins and riverbeds on its surface now attest. But three billion years ago the planet lost its magnetic field, possibly due to a cooling of its coreallowing the solar wind to destroy its atmosphere. This, it was thought, caused the water to evaporate into space.

However, according to a new study node Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesit appears the water may still be there, trapped in the pores of the volcanic rock between 11.5 and 20 km (7 to 13 miles) below ground. If so much water were transported back to the surface, it would cover the entire planet Mars in a globe-circling ocean about a mile deep. Even below ground, the presence of so much water could have significant implications for the possibility of Martian life in rocky pores or mud.

“Water is necessary for life as we know it,” said Michael Manga, study co-author and professor of geophysics and planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, in a study declaration. “I don’t see why [the underground reservoir] It is not a habitable environment. It’s certainly true on Earth – deep mines host life, the ocean floor hosts life.”

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The new discoveries are the result of studies carried out by Mars InSight spacecraftwhich landed on the Red Planet in 2018 and operated until 2022. InSight’s instrument suite included a seismometer, which detected marsquases up to magnitude 5—a moderate earthquake on the Richter scale. The tremors may have been caused by volcanic upheavals, meteor impacts, or the contraction of the crust, but what mattered more than the source was the speed at which the energy was transmitted through the subsurface. Computer models of these measurements were consistent with tremors passing through a flooded region at a depth of 11.5 to 20 km.

“The available data are best explained by a water-saturated middle crust,” the authors wrote.

It’s not just seismic data that points to this conclusion. The amount of surface water trapped in Mars’ polar ice caps is not remotely enough to explain what once existed there – judging by the depth of rivers and ocean depressions. This means the water sank or disappeared into space, and the new findings indicate it was the former.

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“Understanding the Martian water cycle is critical to understanding the evolution of the climate, surface and interior,” said Vashan Wright, another co-author of the paper and assistant professor of geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. . in a declaration. “A useful starting point is to identify where the water is and how much there is.”

The presence of water could mean great things for Martian biology, as well as for our understanding of the planet’s history, but we are no closer to one day being able to live off Martian land. The deepest hole ever drilled on Earth is the Kola super-deep well in northwestern Russia, which stretches for about 12 km. It may be deep enough to touch the water on the Red Planet, but no one pretends that it would be possible to transport the same kind of massive drilling equipment that dug the Kola hole to Mars.

“Drilling a hole 10 kilometers deep on Mars – even for [Elon] Musk – it would be difficult”, Manga told BBC News.