An enormous reserve of liquid water may exist deep beneath the surface of Mars inside cracked igneous rocks, sufficient to fill an ocean that would cover the whole surface of Earth’s planetary neighbor.
That is the conclusion reached by scientists using seismic data collected by NASA’s robotic InSight lander during a mission to better interpret Mars’ innards.
The water, which is buried roughly 7.2 to 12.4 miles (11.5 to 20 km) below the Martian surface, may have provided suitable circumstances for microbial life in the past or in the present, according to researchers.
The crust is heated enough at these depths for liquid water to exist. The primary author of the study, Vashan Wright of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, stated that the water would be frozen as ice at shallower depths.
The study was published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
In order to investigate Mars’ deep interior and collect information on the planet’s many layers—from its liquid metal core to its mantle and crust—the InSight lander landed on the planet in 2018. InSight’s mission came to an end in 2022.
“The speed of seismic waves and their depth dependence were measured by InSight. What makes up the rock, where there are fissures, and what fills those fissures determine the speed of seismic waves,” according to Wright.
The information suggested that the Martian crust, which is the planet’s outermost layer, had this liquid water reservoir inside fractured igneous rocks that were created during the cooling and solidification of magma or lava.
Seismic and gravity data are best explained by a mid-crust whose rocks are fractured and filled with liquid water, according to Wright.
Water is present in fissures. In the event that the InSight location is indicative and all of the water is extracted from the mid-crust fissures, the total amount of water on Mars is estimated to fill an ocean that is 1-2 km (0.6-1.2 miles) deep.
The surface of Mars used to be warm and moist, but it is now bleak and chilly. More than three billion years ago, that changed. According to the study, a large portion of the water that was formerly on the Martian surface filtered into the crust rather than escaping into space.
