Water on Mars Is Trapped Inside the Planet!
Is there water on Mars?
How can we explain the absence of liquid state water on its surface?
Is there any chance to extract water from the inner of Mars?
How much water was present billions of years ago on the red planet?
Scientists are trying to figure all of these things out.
As years pass by, we start to get new answers,
which lead to new important questions. But, why do we care about water on Mars?
Follow me on this video to get to know more about the secrets of the Red Planet.
Are you thirsty? Good news: we got water. And maybe it is much more than you think.
The first spacecraft from Earth to visit Mars was Mariner 4 in 1965. Since then, several robotic
spacecraft have flown by, orbited, or landed on Mars and sent back lots of information about this
world so different from our own. Mars is a cold, bleak wasteland,
with very thin air that we Earthlings could never breathe. However, many of the pictures
our telescopes, orbiters, and rovers have sent back show signs that liquid water might have
been on the surface of Mars long ago. Also, we can see ice caps at the north and south poles.
All these signs of water are very exciting. Why? Because on Earth,
almost everywhere there is water, there is life. Whether the water is boiling hot or frozen,
some sort of creature seems to thrive in it. At this point, is fair to ask ourselves:
is it the same on other planets? If water once flowed on Mars,
did life once thrive there too? Or, maybe there is still water on Mars,
only it has gone underground. Could there be tiny life forms—like bacteria—on Mars even now?
That's why we are looking for water. Is it enough for you?
“Can Mars support life?”: this is what we are actually asking
when we ask “Is there water on Mars?”. All of these questions – together with
the curiosity of human mankind – pushed us to go and see what we could say about Mars,
the dream planet, which some braveheart already calls “Second Home”.
If we ever find water on Mars – or at least if we ever find a way to get water
on Mars without bringing it from Earth – it would be a revolution, and we could start
to drastically change our mindset in the prevision of human colonization of Mars.
Probes were launched. Laser beams were sent on Mars and reflected right back on Earth.
Telescopes were pointed on the Red Planet. Thousands of images were captured. A big
quantity of cinematical, spectroscopical, chemical and biological data was collected by scientists
over the years. Rovers landed on Mars, etc... As you can see, we spent a lot of effort to
understand better the secrets of this Romantic, cold, red planet.
Here's what we already know about water on Mars. On Mars, meteor strikes may have generated
tsunamis 10 times larger than anything seen here—behemoth
waves of destruction capable of submerging the Statue of Liberty and the Capitol Building.
The mega-tsunamis would have occurred about 3.4 billion years ago when two large space rocks
slammed into a chilly sea in the Martian north. The first of these impacts, according to a study
published this week in Scientific Reports, spawned massive, nearly 400-foot-tall (120-meter-tall)
waves that carried bus-size boulders many miles inland. The waves flooded more than 220,000 square
miles (570,000 square kilometres), an area larger than the many U.S. States. How do we know that?
Today, evidence for these ancient cataclysms takes the form of channels carved
by the receding waves, lobe-shaped fields strewn with boulders,
and craters that appear to have been filled with now evaporated seawater.
Scientists say also their findings suggest rivers may have flowed on the surface of
Mars for hundreds of thousands of years. The evidence came from new satellite pictures
of the Martian surface. These images were captured by a camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The camera can take detailed pictures of the surface while orbiting the planet from about
400 kilometres away. Can you believe it? We were able to see the traces of an old Mars river.
Also, we know that at the poles there is water ice.
This is amazing. And it's not over:
a little time ago, researchers made a big splash when they announced that Mars
might be hiding lakes beneath its southern pole. The European Mars Express spacecraft used its
Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) to detect the proposed water.
Ground-penetrating radar sent radar pulses to the surface, then timed how long it took
for them to be reflected. The properties of the subsurface layers affect how long it takes for
the beams to return.MARSIS' investigation revealed that the Martian south pole
is composed of multiple layers of ice and dust to a depth of about nearly 1 mile (1.5 kilometres)
spread over a 124-mile-wide (200 km) region. Today, we have pieces of evidence for a bunch
of frozen lakes under the Martian soil! It is actually a gathering of lakes.
Long story short, Mars had water—until it didn’t. Scientists think that about four billion years
ago, the planet had substantial amounts of liquid water on its surface, enough to form rivers,
lakes, seas, and even oceans—and perhaps also to support life. But something happened in the
following billion years, triggering the loss of this water from the surface until all that was
left was the cold, dry wasteland of a world that we see today. Why and how that happened remains
somewhat of a mystery. “We don’t exactly know why the water levels decreased and Mars became arid”.
So we have to figure out why Mars lost its water. This is what we are going to talk about from now
on in the video, and the answers we'll give will be amazing.
In recent years, results from NASA’s Mars-orbiting MAVEN
spacecraft suggested the driver of this water depletion may have been an atmospheric loss.
Long ago, for reasons unknown, Mars lost its strong magnetic field, exposing the planet
to atmosphere-eroding outbursts from the sun. As a result, much of Mars’s air escaped to space,
presumably carrying away most of the planet’s water with it.
But in a new paper published this week in the journal Science, prof. Scheller
and her colleagues argue this process alone cannot explain Mars’s modern-day aridity.
Instead, they say that a substantial amount of the planet’s water—between 30 and 99 per
cent—retreated into the crust, where it remains today, in a process known as crustal hydration.
That loss to space would have to be very large to explain the loss of all of Mars’s water.
Scientists realized they needed to pay attention to the evidence from the last 10 to 15 years
of Mars exploration in terms of the nature of water in the Martian crust.
Using this swathe of evidence from a variety of Mars missions, the team found that the
rate of atmospheric loss today was not enough to explain the disappearance of all Mars’s water.
Scientists over the past few years learned a lot about the interaction between the sun
and the martian atmosphere. They learned how the water vapour in the air of mars is bombarded by
various ultraviolet radiation from the sun and how a lot of this interacts eventually,
causing the hydrogen to get stripped from oxygen and essentially the water molecules to break apart
and escaping from the planet, mostly because hydrogen inside water is a very light gas by
itself, and so it’s not going to stick around the planet and essentially escapes into outer space.
But today we know that there is an isotope of hydrogen known, like deuterium, and certain parts
of water contain this deuterium in there as well. Because deuterium is almost exactly double the
mass of simple hydrogen, it’s more likely to stick around and is more likely to actually
remain on Mars, thus deposited In some sort of a rock or somewhere else where we can later find it.
And because scientists today know the general ratio between hydrogen and deuterium in normal
water, we can normally determine or at least estimate the presence of water on early Mars.
What scientists found using this technique, in other words, by comparing the number of
deuterium to hydrogen atoms found in a certain sample, scientists were able to estimate that
the total amount of water must have been much much larger and the amount of water present.
In a few words, it's not possible that all the martian water got simply lost in space.
Whereas hydrogen is light enough to easily slip away from a planet’s gravitational grip,
the element’s heavier isotope deuterium cannot. Thus, a relative dearth of deuterium in the
atmosphere today suggests that less water may have been lost in this way than was thought.
There must be a parallel explanation to it, a complementary one. But which one?
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Crustal hydration—in which water is incorporated into the crystalline structure of minerals—is
a natural choice for that explanation. And in fact, it was previously proposed as an
important mechanism for Martian water loss. Some evidence shows that the process must have occurred
at certain points in the planet’s history. In a few words, the crust is made of some sort
of sponge rocks, absorbing water over time! But don't expect to squeeze the sponge and get water!
In fact, this crustal-hydration scenario would not mean Mars hides a liquid-water wonderland
in its subsurface. Rather, because the water would be locked in minerals, the Martian crust could
be especially enriched in clays and hydrated salts. So why didn't this happened to Earth?
The fact that, on Earth, this process has not robbed us of our oceans may be linked to plate
tectonics, which allows the rock-locked water to be efficiently released through volcanic activity.
On a planet free of plate tectonics such as Mars, however, this water would remain trapped.
No matter how high the loss rate was, however, a significant amount of water
would have been going into the crust, likely more than half the planet’s total.
The research team estimates that Mars would have lost between 40 and 95 per cent of its water
via this process in the planet’s Noachian period, which stretches from 4.1 billion
to 3.7 billion years ago. But even later in Mars’s history, bursts of volcanic activity could
have recycled some of the subsurface moisture, potentially giving the planet’s habitability a
much-needed boost. So currently scientists think the water was available 3.5 billion years ago.
But what about three billion years ago? Of course, current and future missions could help us better
answer the question. Space mission from all over the world is going to leave for the Red Planet,
as well as studies that are already being conducted.
Meanwhile, NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars last month, could also
provide useful results on how extensively hydrated minerals are at its landing site, Jezero Crater.
More importantly, it will collect samples that could help delve into this problem
further once they are brought back to Earth next decade. We can measure the deuterium-to-hydrogen
ratio in the water in those, which will help us sort out what ancient parts of Mars were like.
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