Mars‘s crusty interior may harbor massive reservoirs of water, enough to fill an ocean, according to a recent study of seismic data.
Scientists have long though that Mars’s surface was once covered by water, most likely stretching across at least one third of the terrain in a massive northern ocean. But the water dried up a millennia ago, and those studying the red planet have debated whether the water simply evaporated due to the planet’s size or was absorbed beneath the surface to be held in vast underground reservoirs.
A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests the latter after an analysis of seismic data showed that the speed of waves traveling through the planet’s crust indicates similar reservoirs to ones that can be found below the Earth’s surface, according to Reuters. Scientists have also debated whether such water would be frozen or whether Mars’s active crust would keep the water warm enough to be liquid. The study suggests the latter.
“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,” the lead author of the study, Vashan Wright of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said.
“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 study further suggests the reservoirs of water could hold microbial life like that found in the Earth.
“On Earth, we find microbial life deep underground where rocks are saturated with water and there is an energy source,” study co-author Michael Manga of the University of California, Berkeley, said.
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Finding water on Mars has been of interest to anyone looking to colonize the planet’s surface. The ice caps hold frozen water, but whether that would be enough to sustain life in the long term has long been a matter of speculation. The subsurface water on Mars found in the study would be difficult to access, however, considering it is 7.2 to 12.4 miles below the planet’s surface. That’s just about how deep scientists found the diamond crust of Mercury.
The data come from NASA’s InSight lander, which launched in 2018 and finished its four-year mission in 2022. Scientists are still trolling through the mission’s data in order to discover more about Mars’s interior.