An immense reservoir of liquid water might reside deep under the surface of Mars within fractured igneous rocks, holding enough to fill an ocean that would cover the entire surface of Earth’s planetary neighbor.
That is the conclusion of scientists based on seismic data obtained by NASA’s robotic InSight lander during a mission that helped decipher the interior of Mars. The water 11.5km to 20km below the Martian surface potentially offers conditions favorable to sustain microbial life, either in the past or now, the researchers said.
“At these depths, the crust is warm enough for water to exist as a liquid. At more shallow depths, the water would be frozen as ice,” said planetary scientist Vashan Wright of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Photo: NASA via Reuters
“On Earth, we find microbial life deep underground where rocks are saturated with water and there is an energy source,” added planetary scientist and study coauthor Michael Manga of the University of California, Berkeley.
The InSight lander touched down in 2018 to study the deep interior of Mars, gathering data on the planet’s various layers, from its liquid metal core to its mantle and its crust. The InSight mission ended in 2022.
“InSight was able to measure the speed of seismic waves and how they change with depth. The speed of seismic waves depends on what the rock is made of, where it has cracks and what fills the cracks,” Wright said. “We combined the measured seismic wave speed, gravity measurements and rock physics models. The rock physics models are the same as the ones we use to measure properties of aquifers on Earth, or map oil and gas resources underground.”
The data indicated the presence of the reservoir of liquid water within fractured igneous rocks — formed in the cooling and solidification of magma or lava — in the Martian crust, the planet’s outermost layer.
“A mid-crust whose rocks are cracked and filled with liquid water best explains both seismic and gravity data,” Wright said. “The water exists within fractures. If the InSight location is representative and you extract all the water from the fractures in the mid-crust, we estimate that the water would fill a 1km to 2 km deep ocean on Mars globally.”
The Martian surface is cold and desolate today, but once was warm and wet. That changed more than 3 billion years ago. The study suggests that much of the water that had been on the Martian surface did not escape into space, but rather filtered down into the crust.
Water would be a vital resource if astronauts ever were sent to the Martian surface to establish some sort of long-term settlement. Mars harbors water in the form of ice at its polar regions and in its subsurface, but the depth of the apparent underground liquid water would make it difficult to access.
“Drilling to these depths is very challenging. Looking for places where geological activity expels this water ... is an alternative to looking for deep liquids,” Manga said.
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
Some things might go without saying, but just in case... Belgium’s food agency issued a public health warning as the festive season wrapped up on Tuesday: Do not eat your Christmas tree. The unusual message came after the city of Ghent, an environmentalist stronghold in the country’s East Flanders region, raised eyebrows by posting tips for recycling the conifers on the dinner table. Pointing with enthusiasm to examples from Scandinavia, the town Web site suggested needles could be stripped, blanched and dried — for use in making flavored butter, for instance. Asked what they thought of the idea, the reply
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
RSS