Study found Mars still contains oceans of water buried below the surface

Billions of years ago, geological evidence indicates that the cold, dry red planet was much bluer. There was enough water collected from ponds, lakes, and deep oceans to cover the entire planet in an ocean about 100 to 1,500 meters (330 to 4,920 feet) deep. This is equivalent to roughly half of the land Atlantic Ocean.

The question is: what exactly happened to all that water?

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While water can be found frozen in the polar caps of Mars, Scientists had previously suggested that the water flowing on Mars was leaking into space due to the planet’s low gravity.. And while some of the water has already left Mars in this way, New NASA-backed study says a lot of its water is still on the planet, trapped in its crust.

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“Leaking the atmosphere does not fully explain the data we have on how much water was already present on Mars before,” said Eva Schiller, lead author of the research paper published in the journal Science.

How the researchers estimated the water March

Schiller and his colleagues used data from rovers and vehicles orbiting Mars as well as meteorite analyzes to study the amount of water present on the Red Planet. At the start and how much you have lost over time.

One way to do this is to analyze the levels of hydrogen in a planet’s atmosphere and rocks. Water is made up of both hydrogen and oxygen, but hydrogen atoms are not equal. Most of them contain only one proton inside the nucleus of the atom, while the so-called “heavy” hydrogen contains an extra neutron.

NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Ordinary hydrogen has little difficulty escaping the gravitational pull of a heavier deuterium planet. Thus, the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen (D / H) in the planet’s atmosphere reflects the loss of Martian water.

“It is clear that atmospheric leakage has a role in water loss, but the results of the last decade of missions to Mars have shown that this huge reservoir of ancient water minerals was present whose formation certainly reduced availability of water over time ”explains Bethany Illman, professor. Of Planetary Sciences and Associate Director of the Keck Institute for Space Studies.

When water and rocks meet, a process called chemical weathering can occur to form clays and other minerals that contain water. As part of its metal structure.

And while Mars still has between 30 and 99 percent of its water trapped in the Earth’s crust, Schiller warns that it won’t be easy for future astronauts to easily extract the water for their use.