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On Mars, rock formations 10 to 20 kilometers deep contain enough water to support an entire planet-wide ocean one to two kilometers deep. A team led by Vashan Wright of the University of California, San Diego, discovered the underground reservoir while evaluating data from the InSight rover on Mars.
“Three billion years ago, Mars had a large amount of liquid water on its surface,” Wright and his colleagues explain in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), as evidenced by the presence of numerous rivers, lakes and seas in images taken by Mars rovers.
Measurement results from 2018 to 2022
Where all this water remained after Mars almost completely lost its atmosphere remains unclear. The guess: A large portion of it may have seeped into the subsurface soil. To investigate this suspicion, Wright and his colleagues reanalyzed the InSight data and compared it to various models of water-bearing rock formations.
Equipped with a seismometer, a device that measures ground vibrations, the rover observed the interior of the Red Planet between 2018 and 2022. The propagation of vibrations in Martian rocks caused by marsquakes, or meteorite impacts, provides researchers with a detailed understanding of the planet’s internal structure.
“Necessities of life”
After analysis, the researchers concluded that the data is best explained by igneous aquifers at depths of 10 to 20 kilometers. However, this water would be almost unusable for future Martian colonists – both because of its great depth and because the water is hidden in pores and cracks in the rocks, making it difficult to extract.
Such a layer is still important: on Earth, even at great depths, microorganisms can still be found in rocks. “Water is essential for life as we know it,” emphasizes Wright’s colleague Michael Manga. “So it’s not unreasonable to assume that water-bearing rock layers on Mars could also provide a habitable environment for microorganisms.”
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