Researchers claim to have discovered huge amounts of water on Mars. It is said that they are deep beneath the surface.
On Mars, the rock layers at a depth of ten to twenty kilometers contain so much water that this would be enough to create an ocean one to two kilometers deep on the entire planet.
A team led by Vashan Wright of the University of California, San Diego, came across the underground water reservoir while evaluating data from the Mars probe “InSight.”
Water seeped out
“More than three billion years ago, there were large amounts of liquid water on the surface of Mars,” Wright and his colleagues explain in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (“PNAS”). Numerous traces of rivers, lakes and a large ocean are evidence of this in images from Mars probes.
Where this water went after Mars lost almost all of its atmosphere is still unclear. Much of the water could have seeped into the ground.
To investigate this suspicion, Wright and his colleagues reanalyzed the InSight data and compared it to several models of water-bearing rock layers.
After the analysis, the researchers concluded that the data could best be explained by an aquifer of igneous rock at a depth of ten to twenty kilometers.
Water barely usable
However, this water would be of little use to future Mars colonists – partly because of its great depth and partly because the water is hidden in pores and cracks in the rock and is therefore difficult to extract.
Source: Krone
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