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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS