Mars May Have Vast Underground Oceans
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Mars may still be home to oceanic quantities of liquid water, according to a recent paper published by the National Science Review.
Titled Seismic evidence of liquid water at the base of Mars' upper crust", the paper [PDF] notes that liquid water once flowed freely on the surface of Mars before the planet's magnetic field faded, its atmosphere thinned, and it became the dry and frozen hellscape we know today.
The paper's authors - from China's Academy of Sciences, the Australian National University, and the University of Milano-Bicocca - note the generally accepted theory that Mars' water either evaporated into space or was somehow stored in the planet's crust but worry there's little evidence to help us understand how much water may remain.
They think they found that evidence in data gathered by the Mars InSight, the sadly defunct lander that studied the Red Planet's interior, when it recorded the impact of two meteorite impacts in 2021 and a 2022 Marsquake.
Those incidents produced seismic waves that slowed as they passed through a layer between 5.4 and 8 kilometers below the surface.
The authors cite studies on how quickly seismic waves travel through porous rocks, plus research on how such waves behave as they pass through layers in Earth's crust and conclude that Mars is home to a water-soaked layer 5.4 to 8 kilometers deep."
In a summary of the paper, Australian and Chinese researchers characterize the that layer as most likely highly porous rock filled with liquid water, like a saturated sponge" and akin to Earth's aquifers. The paper estimates the porous rocks contain enough water to cover Mars in a global ocean 520-780m deep.
Journal Reference: Weijia Sun, Hrvoje Tkali, Marco G Malusa, Yongxin Pan, Seismic evidence of liquid water at the base of Mars' upper crust, National Science Review, 2025, nwaf166, https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwaf166
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