Liquid Water Discovered on Mars, Microorganisms May Exist

Scientists announced on Wednesday that they have evidence of liquid water on Mars that may contain microorganisms.

Using radar on an orbital spacecraft, they detected a 20-kilometer-wide lake, 1.5 kilometers beneath the frozen southern pole of the “red planet.”

Is there life elsewhere besides Earth is one of the deepest scientific questions. The latest discovery is promising, although it cannot be considered any definitive proof.

Experts say it will take years to confirm the existence of life in the lake similar to those beneath the ice on Earth. Future missions to Mars will need to drill through the ice to collect water samples beneath it.

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“That part of Mars most resembles a habitat, a place where life could exist,” said Roberto Orosei from the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy, the lead researcher of the study published in the scientific journal Science.

“Such a type of habitat is not ideal for a vacation and is not a place where you would go swimming,” he added. “However, we know that there are some organisms on Earth that can live in similar environments. On Earth, there are microorganisms that can even live in ice,” Orosei emphasized.

The lake was detected using data collected from May 2012 to December 2015, using an instrument on the Mars Express spacecraft of the European Space Agency.

“It took us years to analyze the data and come up with a method to unequivocally determine that what we saw was actually water,” said study co-author Enrico Flamini.

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Radar images resemble those of subglacial lakes beneath the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland.

Orosei says that the temperature of the water in the lake on Mars is below the normal freezing point, but it remains liquid due to high salinity. He estimated the water temperature to be between -14 and -90 degrees Celsius.

It remains to be seen whether there are more reservoirs of water beneath the surface and whether this newly discovered one is some kind of anomaly, Orosei said.

If new branches or a network of subglacial lakes similar to those on Earth are discovered, it could mean that water has existed there for millions of years, even before about 3.5 billion years ago when Mars was a much more hospitable planet.

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The question is, Orosei says, whether any form of life that developed on Mars back then could have survived to this day. “No one dares to say that there is some complex form of life there,” concluded the Italian scientist.