#New research says liquid water might exist on Mars
“#New research says liquid water might exist on Mars”
New research shows that the Red Planet may actually have liquid water in salty lakes under its polar ice cap — thus giving a place for life to develop, according to a report.
The bodies of water, if confirmed, would be similar to the subglacial lakes that exist on Earth, beneath the Antarctic and the Greenland ice sheets, where, despite the cold, bacterial life exists, NBC News reported.
“We are much more confident now,” lead researcher Elena Pettinelli, a professor of geophysics at Italy’s Roma Tre University, told the network. “We did many more observations, and we processed the data completely differently.”
If the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, is verified, it would mark the first time liquid lakes were found on Mars.
Scientists have long speculated that — just as Earth’s subglacial lakes are filled with bacterial life — something similar might be the case in liquid reservoirs on Mars.
Pettinelli, a planetary scientist, and her team reviewed 134 ground-penetrating radar observations taken from the Mars Express Orbiter between 2012 and 2019 — more than four times as much data as before and taken during a time period more than twice as long, NBC reported.
They used two techniques to review their findings — one already applied for the 2018 study, and a newer one that has been used to find lakes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet.
Both methods point to a “patchwork” of buried reservoirs of liquid on Mars — a large reservoir about 15 miles across, coupled with several smaller patches up to 6 miles across, Pettinelli said.
The reservoirs begin about a mile below the surface, though the researchers can’t tell how deep they are, she added.
Two other scientists who were not involved in the study cast doubt on the results — one suggesting that the underground body of water seems plausible, but it might not be as cold or salty as the researchers believe, according to NBC.
Another suggested that Mars is much too cold for even the saltiest water to exist in liquid form.
“If we apply the same interpretation, then there should be springs flowing out along the edge of the polar cap,” planetary scientist Jack Holt of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson, said in an email to the network. “And that is not the case.”
The research was published only weeks after astronomers pointed to a potential sign of life on Venus.
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