Mars is a wet planet in addition to being a red planet. US scientists revealed evidence of a sizable liquid water reserve located deep inside the planet’s stony crust on August 12.
The information was gathered over a four-year period from NASA’s Mars Insight Lander, which recorded over 1,300 Marsquakes. After analyzing the seismic waves that reached the lander, scientists under the direction of Vashan Wright, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, came to the conclusion that they had traveled through moist rock strata.
Wright’s study indicates that despite the desolate surface of Mars, significant amounts of water may be trapped in rocks between 11.5 and 20 kilometers (7.1–12.4 miles) below the surface.
Scientists have been gathering evidence that life exists on Earth’s deep subsurface for more than thirty years. Through drilling deep below the sea floor and continents, scientists have discovered life hidden among layers and crystals of solid rock as well as in buried sediments.
The majority of these creatures that live in the dark are single-celled bacteria and archaea. These two enormous groupings predate both plants and animals by nearly three billion years, making them the oldest known forms of life on Earth.
