Scientists Discovered a Liquid Lake on Mars. Could That Mean Life?

It’s awfully hard to kill a planet—and Mars should know, because Mars ought to be dead by now. Long ago, perhaps 4.3 billion years back, the Red Planet was a place not unlike Earth. It had a thick atmosphere and abundant water, much of which might have been concentrated in a vast ocean in its northern hemisphere. All over the rest of the planet were lakes, smaller oceans and rivers. But Mars’s interior soon cooled. That snuffed out its protective magnetic field, which in turn allowed charged particles streaming from the sun to claw away Mars’ atmosphere. Once the air was gone, the water sputtered into space. Without water, life, at least as we know it, is impossible. And yet, Mars is hanging on. In a study published Wednesday in Science, researchers working with the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft report the existence of a 12.5-mile-wide liquid water lake just beneath a layer of ice at Mars’s south pole. On Earth, life got its start in stable bodies of water, and the same could be true on Mars. What’s more, where there’s one lake, there could easily be several. “There is no reason to conclude,” the study’s authors wrote, “that the presence of subsurface water is limited to a single location.” It’s been clear for a while that at least some Martian water was able to survive the great drying that hit the planet so long ago. In 2008, the robotic arm on NASA’s Phoenix lander ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime space Source Type: news