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For decades, researchers have searched extensively for water on Mars. Because where there is water, life could also flourish. Italian researchers have now found an entire lake, the size of Lake Thun. It hides under a mile of thick ice at the south pole of Mars.
Huge ice caps cover the poles of Mars, resembling the polar ice caps of the Earth in Greenland and Antarctica.
ESA / Roscosmos / CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 OIG
The researchers discovered the lake under the ice with a radar. He bypasses the red planet as a passenger on the European probe Marsexpress and sweeps its surface of rays. Depending on whether these rays reach the sand, rock, ice or water, they are rejected a little differently from the radar apparatus – an image of the planet is formed. Ice can penetrate the radar beams, the research team finally discovered the lake under the ice cap at the south pole of Mars
Ice Lakes
But they were cautious and came back for three and a half years before discovering their discovery in the magazine Have made "Science" known. Rightly so: Many times, researchers have reported with a lot of sulfur that they have found water on the marshy planet, and this has turned out to be a mistake time and time again. This time, however, the chances are good that the announcement is correct: lakes under ice, as we know from Earth, Antarctica – and these lakes were found using the same technique measurement.
Caption: [19659004] Ice-covered deposits in the south of Mars.ESA / Roscosmos / CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 OIG
But why can there be liquid water in the middle of a block of ice? If a flop of ice is thick enough, its own weight at the bottom creates high pressure – and it melts the ice. This can help salts that dissolve from the substrate in this meltwater, as the salts lower the freezing point. This is needed on very cold Mars, reaching a temperature of minus 120 degrees on a winter night.
Hypersalzig and zappenduster
A large lake on Mars makes the hearts of planets beat faster. But really the scientific pulse would run if life was discovered on our neighbor. A lake increases the chances because life as we know it needs water. However, the lake that is now found offers very harsh conditions: many degrees of cold, hypersalous and zappenduster, perhaps also quite corrosive. [1965] 090] However, microbiologists on Earth have found that life is always in every niche to flourish: life in the form of bacteria. Some sit deep in the ground and eat stones, others like to boil hot water, others thrive in radioactive waste. So why not in a lake under Martian South Pole? Perhaps in the form of spores particularly robust, which form bacteria in particularly difficult times, to better expose themselves.
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