back to article Astroboffins present fresh evidence of moving liquid water on Mars

Liquid water may be lurking beneath the southern polar ice cap on Mars, according to fresh evidence reported in Nature Astronomy. Dark streaks and other surface patterns on Martian slopes hint that the unforgiving dust world may have once supported lakes and oceans billions of years ago. The loss of its atmosphere is believed …

  1. Tom 7

    Cloud cover on Mars S pole?

    Just wondering if it would be clear often enough to allow reliable solar heat to extract the water and make breathing gas and rocket fuel.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: Cloud cover on Mars S pole?

      Why bother with solar heating if Mars is warm enough for free-flowing underground (underice) water? Sounds to me like a drill rig might make more sense.

      1. Tom 7

        Re: Cloud cover on Mars S pole?

        Because one you move it out of the ground, through the dry ice on top, its going to need something from stopping it going solid! Once its 2O2 and H2 it can be piped easily.

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: Cloud cover on Mars S pole?

          Move the water underground to where solar conditions are more conducive. Note that the Mars regolith is a fairly decent insulator.

          Also note that the regolith/water boundary is the most likely place to find life, making digging there a valuable scientific tool.

          Moving H2 is never exactly easy. It hates confinement.

      2. RegGuy1 Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: Cloud cover on Mars S pole?

        Sounds to me like a drill rig might make more sense.

        Hello Elon, tell them when they send your Spaceships to include Pod 2 -- the one with The Mole...

  2. jake Silver badge
    Pint

    They keep saying that ...

    "the water beneath the south pole might need to be really salty, which would make it difficult for any microbial life to inhabit it."

    Oh, I dunno. We have the rather imaginatively named "brine shrimp" here on Earth, which are capable of living in saturated salt solutions. We also have the smaller critters that they feed on. If they can survive on Earth, why not Mars? Yes, I know, solutions of different combinations of salts ... but I've seen critters living in mining runoff that isn't all that different from what the chemistry on Mars is probably like. Even in what us puny Humans would consider extremely inhospitable conditions, life always seems to find a way.

    I guess we'll find out ... Hope I'm alive to see it.

    A beer for the hard working boffins.

    1. Tom 7

      Re: They keep saying that ...

      I have a feeling Mars never had the 'whatever it takes' to get life started I think you'd need something like the Moon to make massive slushies over volcanic vents just to get the mixing of the required ingredients over the massive possibilities required to get the 120 odd genes together in away that can actually start reproducing then bobs your twenty legged brine shrimp after a billion years or so. I hope I'm wrong but Luca investigations dont seem to make it look like everything started in one place. You really need some hubble bubble and and a big pot to stir it in.

      1. TVU

        Re: They keep saying that ...

        "I have a feeling Mars never had the 'whatever it takes' to get life started"

        Indeed. Everyone seems to concentrate on the fact that Mars is half the diameter of the Earth but perhaps the better figure to look at is the planet's mass. Mars' mass is only one ninth of the Earth so the core in Mars' interior cools down much more quickly and so the protective planetary magnetosphere and large scale volcanic replenishment of the atmosphere go after a few hundred million years which is probably not enough time for life to evolve. Today, Mars' atmosphere gives every sign of being in chemical equilibrium so indicating that there's no life present on the planet.

        For a planet to be habitable, you would probably need a planet that was at least one third the mass of the Earth for life to get started.

      2. jake Silver badge

        Re: They keep saying that ...

        Mars may have had ice asteroids raining down on it faster than the water could escape just long enough for life to have been bootstrapped. Once life takes a hold, it seems it's incredibly hard to get rid of it.

        Who knows. At this point, it's more about the journey than the destination.

    2. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

      Re: They keep saying that ...

      Go smaller still: halophiles. It just depends whether prokaryotic forms could emerge and whether they could adapt as Mars dried out. We just don't know enough about how life emerged on Earth to be certain. (And I will be so pissed off if they share a genetic link with us and the panspermia whackos are proved right.)

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: They keep saying that ...

        Exactly.

        I'm ambivalent about panspermia. Either way, we learn something fascinating.

        1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

          Re: They keep saying that ...

          Finding out panspermia is right will be like finding out every major human civilization is descended from Atlantis; a bunch of quasi-mystics and cowardly scientists who ran away from life's rich complexity get to say, "I told you so."

          (I could maybe settle with us having a native biota that is merciless obliterated in the Great Oxidation Event by cyanobacteria that have hitched a ride from Mars. I'm not sure they get bragging rights for that. Better, yet, if our native prokaryotes survived - perhaps they are the archaea - that would be almost cool, even if it magnifies some of the flaws I'm about to list.)

          But fundamentally, panspermia is a useless idea. It makes it even harder to uncover how life got going. It means we don't get to look at a different path evolution has taken. And it adds another---very small---coefficient to the Drake equation - so you better hope Putin doesn't press the button because, if life has to evolve on one planet and be transplanted to another, we probably are alone.

          However if life evolved separately on Mars, the universe will be teaming with life. And we will get to see other solutions; even if they turn out to be a boringly similar RNA/DNA, we will have learnt something about what is possible and what life might look like elsewhere.

    3. Swarthy

      Re: They keep saying that ...

      My guess is that the "salt" in Martian water would be perchlorate salts, considering we have found that the surface we've explored has been riddled with 'em.

      ClO4- may be a bit harsher on life than plain old NaCl.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: They keep saying that ...

        Note I said "salts", implying other than pure table salt.

        As I said, I've seen life living in some pretty toxic[0] shit seeping out of old mining operations. Life living in perchlorate infused water on Mars wouldn't surprise me ... beyond the "holy shit, life DOES exist on Mars!" amazement, of course.

        Hi, amfM. How's it hanging? Care for a beer?

        [0] Toxic to most other Earth life ... but not so much to the organisms living in it.

  3. Forget It
    Linux

    Water, water, everywhere,

    And all the boards did shrink;

    Water, water, everywhere,

    Nor any drop to drink.

    https://poets.org/poem/rime-ancient-mariner

    1. Pirate Dave Silver badge

      Re: Water, water, everywhere,

      Time to find my Powerslave CD...

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Danny 2

      Re: Water, water, everywhere,

      "The chances of anyone going to Mars

      Are a million to one" he said

      "The chances of anyone going to Mars

      Are a million to one, but still they come!"

    3. Tom 7

      Re: Water, water, everywhere,

      All the boards did shrink? Poetic bollocks - they used sea water to wash everything down! Every winter we have to fill our gig with sea water to stop it leaking. Fresh water will suck out the salt in the cells and make it shrink.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: Water, water, everywhere,

        Worse, fresh water allows rot ... and later, dry rot under the right conditions. Keep that bilge slightly damp with sea water if you want to stay afloat. And make sure that topside is sealed against rain ...

        Part of the reason they never invented a "perfect" packing gland, innit.

  4. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Coat

    "The team believes Mars must still be geothermically active"

    Mars is tectonically dead. It has no magnetic field, which means its core is not moving any more.

    Granted, the sheer volume of material is going to take an undetermined amount of time to cool off, but if the core was that hot, the ice would have melted.

    There may well be a point below the surface where the core can agreeably heat an underground dwelling, but I fail to see how that can impact subsurface ice.

    Of course, I'm not a geologist, much less an exo-geologist, so maybe I'm just ranting for nothing.

    1. MacroRodent

      Re: "The team believes Mars must still be geothermically active"

      Like on Earth, there most likely are radioactive elements in the crust of Mars that give off heat as they decay.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Pint

        Re: "The team believes Mars must still be geothermically active"

        Indeed. The latest studies of Ceres posit that its radioactive elements not only provide local heat but also can heat portions of the core enough that the blob rises to the mantle where they replace cooler blobs which descend creating tectonic activity. From yesterday:

        https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-identify-the-source-of-the-planet-ceres-unexpected-geological-activity/

        So many boffins, so many discoveries, so little time to keep up.

    2. Tom 7

      Re: "The team believes Mars must still be geothermically active"

      It will still be generating heat in the whole of the solid stuff. The heat will diffuse to the surface but its cold. They even stuck a drill on a probe with the intention of digging down a couple of meters in to gauge just how much heat there was coming up but they couldnt get it in more than a few inches. Cold does that to you!

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: "The team believes Mars must still be geothermically active"

        It wasn't cold that stopped the bit. It was a wrong guess as to the physical properties of the material being drilled. It was acting like bearings instead of shavings. Fine aggregate concretions will do that occasionally, even here on Earth. Ask any hard-rock miner.

    3. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

      Re: "The team believes Mars must still be geothermically active"

      There are tremors and a liquid core. And I'm not sure the generation of magnetic fields is well enough understood to say the how stationary the core is. But I'm sure convection would be possible without the rotation necessary for a dynamo and a global magnetic field.

      And anyway, I guess they're talking about a small amount of heat warming the bottom of the ice enough to melt it but not the burn through. The article points out such phenomena are not unknown on earth. And there are things which might be geysers (but probably aren't) or mars.

    4. jake Silver badge

      Re: "The team believes Mars must still be geothermically active"

      "if the core was that hot, the ice would have melted."

      It would appear that it is that hot, and there is an equilibrium point where there is an ice/water boundary.

      Or so the data suggests.

  5. Fr. Ted Crilly Silver badge

    well then

    I think Zygote should be the name of my under ice habitat...

  6. StrangerHereMyself Silver badge

    Brine

    The water flowing beneath the Martian South Pole surface may well be brine that's so salty that it couldn't support life.

  7. Barry Rueger

    Fantastic news!

    Does this mean we can rocket Elon Musk up there ASAP? Seems like perfect excuse to launch him off to another planet!

  8. Potemkine! Silver badge
    Headmaster

    Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar

    NASA's Mars Express

    ESA's Mars Express.

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