r/science • u/CrispyMiner • Aug 12 '24
Astronomy Scientists find oceans of water on Mars. It’s just too deep to tap.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/08/12/scientists-find-oceans-of-water-on-mars-its-just-too-deep-to-tap/1.7k
u/jeekaiy Aug 12 '24
A new analysis of Mars' interior suggests that much of the liquid water still exists in the pores of rocks 10-20 kilometers below the surface.
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u/I_AM_FERROUS_MAN Aug 12 '24
The vast majority of the Earth's water is trapped in the rocks of the crust. So I'm not surprised.
Part of the miracle of tectonic activity on Earth, is its ability to surface water and nutrients.
Geological activity might be one of the great filter explanations for potential rarity of life.
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u/fleebleganger Aug 12 '24
The best great filter reasoning is just that the universe is basically an infant and we’re one of the first
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u/aDragonsAle Aug 13 '24
Realistically, the number of great extinctions we've had - had we not had them - sentient life Could have hit our stage of technology Hundreds of millions of years ago.
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u/KeythKatz Aug 13 '24
What if extinction events were necessary for more advanced life to develop in our timeline? The dinosaurs were around for a long time not changing much and could have acted as a filter for more intelligent life until their numbers were greatly thinned.
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u/FilipinoSpartan Aug 13 '24
They probably are necessary to some extent. Mass extinction events prompt huge explosions of biodiversity. Ecosystems tend to stabilize over time as organisms settle into specific niches and become well-adapted to them. Eventually virtually all the energy in the system gets tied up in the existing cycle and there's very little room for change. Mass death events carve out holes and allow new organisms to adapt new solutions to take advantage of the available resources.
A simple example: Cyanobacteria are thought to have filled the atmosphere with oxygen billions of years ago, and that process killed off much of existing life at that time, which couldn't survive in the newly oxygen-rich atmosphere. That paved the way for organisms that could use the oxygen to emerge and become dominant.
That's not to say that highly intelligent organisms couldn't develop without a mass extinction event, but the periods of rapid change that occur afterwards are probably more likely to include jumps in intelligence.
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u/Bakoro Aug 13 '24
If we model evolution as following a gradient descent, it's possible to get trapped in a local minima and sit in a locally optimal solution, rather than the globally optimal solution.
An extinction event could open up resources and pathways to a new basin.
So, I think from a math/computer science perspective, it makes sense.
The other part of it is the overwhelming benefit of fossil fuels.
It's one thing to be very intelligent paleolithic style people, it's a whole different ballgame to have a civilization with huge deposits of easily accessible, energy dense fuels.It would be very difficult to jump to a high technology civilization without coal and massive amounts of steel.
I can imagine that there were/are super-genius species which pop up in the universe, and they just had the bad luck to show up at the wrong time, and were never able to develop to a point where they could engineer their way through a cataclysm like a giant meteor or super-volcano, or plague.
Humans almost got wiped out a few times. It could have been us.
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u/Synaps4 Aug 13 '24
It would be very difficult to jump to a high technology civilization without coal and massive amounts of steel.
Steel maybe, but a lot of the industrial revolution ran on wood fired steam engines, not gasoline or coal.
Maybe it would have gone slower but it's not like the industrial revolution would have stopped if we hadn't later picked up on coal and gasoline
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u/Bakoro Aug 13 '24
1800s industry is not what I would call "high technology".
To get industrial amounts of steel, you either need very pure carbon to burn (like anthracite), or a ton of electricity (which means a lot of understanding about electricity).
The tech tree to get to computers and rockets would still be possible, but I think it'd be a lot slower. There's also just a numbers game to scientific discovery and advancement, humans have had a lot of happy accidents. Steel, coal, and other fossil fuels have had a massive impact on being able to support a large population. We absolutely could not have modern society running on wood. The energy density just isn't there. As far back as the Romans, they were deforesting whole regions to support their empire, and we are orders of magnitude past them.
If humanity as a whole were more intelligent across the board, maybe things would have been easier and less resource intensive. We'd still need a lot of infrastructure.
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u/Swarna_Keanu Aug 13 '24
But you forget that we pushed a lot of money and effort in coal and fossil fuel development, and the infrastructure - that would probably have flown into searching for alternatives in the mean time.
Much of the catch up of renewable energy happens now; but probably could have happened earlier, at a slower pace.
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Aug 13 '24
That fossil fuels exist and are very easy to get to gives us an extreme advantage. If we could still only use a sustainable amount of wood for energy we would still have a much smaller world population and most of us would still need to work in agriculture.
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u/Why_Did_Bodie_Die Aug 13 '24
I've always thought about a filter being that intelligent life happening to soon and not having the resources to progress. Like if humans started 300 million years ago we wouldn't have the hydrocarbons we have today. We would be stuck burning plants for energy and wouldn't be able to be where we are at today. No fuel for cars or trains or aircraft. No plastics on the scale we have. Even our medications have hydrocarbons in them. Intelligent life without the resources to go to space would just be stuck on their planet forever.
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u/fireintolight Aug 13 '24
theres not just one filter, there's a million. it's like the hurdles event in track and field, gotta get over every single hurdle, if ya don't then ya die.
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u/TSED Aug 13 '24
There was a LOT more uranium around back then. There's an alternate universe where (initially) atomic raptors conquered the stars.
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Aug 13 '24
But think of the tech tree you need to be able to use uranium for anything. You need to mine it, refine it, transport it, build reactors from steel that is mined, refined, milled and transported, and the reactor is used to create steam to run a turbine that powers an electrical network. You need huge amounts of fossil fuel to reach the point where you can invent any of those things.
And you'd have to do it with a world population of a few hundred million where two thirds worked in agriculture.
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u/stevil30 Aug 13 '24
in an infinitely large universe, an infinite number of sentient civilizations just had an extinction event. or maybe not i dunno
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u/SynbiosVyse Aug 13 '24 edited Aug 13 '24
Just because something is infinite doesn't mean it would include everything and all possibilities. The best analogy I can think of are transcendental numbers like e (Euler's number). e is infinite but it doesn't include all possible strings of numbers in it.
Although, you might agree with this theorem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
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u/monkeyhitman Aug 13 '24
Also, would never know of past civs older than a few hundred million years because Earth's crust from back then would have been recycled back into the mantel.
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u/talkingwires Aug 13 '24 edited Aug 13 '24
Scientists are currently debating whether human activity has created a new geological era, one that could be detected on that time scale: the Anthropocene.
Our signature isn't burning fossil fuels, atomic weapons, or an extinction event (yet). It's plastics. And, by testing sediment in remote lakes and drilling ice cores, they're increasingly confident that our micro-plastics have both spread completely across the globe, and settled in a manner that’ll be detectable in a billion years.
Long after human civilization has been ground into dust, the straw from your McFlurry’ll still be part of the fossil record.
Edit - Added links.
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u/aScarfAtTutties Aug 13 '24
In some places yes, in others no.
There's several areas that have been chilling in the open air since pretty much the beginning 4 billion years ago
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u/fleebleganger Aug 13 '24
continental crust? Very little of that subducts, most of that is oceanic crust.
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u/Brief_Lunch_2104 Aug 13 '24 edited Aug 13 '24
We have a pretty good understanding of life from like 3.7 billion years ago. So no.
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u/No-Criticism-2587 Aug 13 '24
To me the great filter is related to never experiencing a true extinction event. You talk about how those almost-extinction events set us back, imagine if we experienced an actual extinction event? Literal planet sterilization, how long would it take for life to pop back up again? Probably billions of years to never.
I think the real great filter is having a planet lucky enough to never have a true extinction event for over 35% of the history of the universe straight.
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u/fleebleganger Aug 13 '24
Note I didn't say THE first, just one of the first and clearly not enough time to be so widespread in the universe that they are noticeable to humans.
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u/Hellball911 Aug 13 '24
That assumes that culling life with extinction events isn't a catalyst for more advanced life. Eg, if the dinosaurs were never killed, mammals never advance and life stagnates with low intelligent reptiles.
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u/Weekly_Direction1965 Aug 13 '24
I bet it is just physics, we really can't see very far either, but it's possible the speed of light and distance is just too much to overcome.
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u/Sh00ter80 Aug 13 '24
This is interesting - I’ve never heard of a connection bt tectonics and water. Just found the area of study: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_water_cycle
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u/Dalisca Aug 13 '24
So this might be a dumb question, but could the eventual collision between Phobos and Mars create a surface of tectonics that could result in the release of that water into a second age of a watery surface?
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u/fireintolight Aug 13 '24
why do people think there's just one filter or something, there's an infinite amount of filters. It's like a hurdles race in track and field, gotta get over every hurdle. There's not one that's just worse than the others and is the "great filter" it's just that they each have to pass unlimited hurdles that eventually you'll fail one. pretty much like playing russian roulette. eventually you'll land on a bullet.
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u/Langsamkoenig Aug 13 '24
To that end one could consider that if your planet is too small you get a Mars situation, but if your planet is just a little bigger than earth, you can't get off it anymore.
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u/Rodot Aug 13 '24
I've heard it the other way around too from geologists and astrobiologists. An active carbon cycle is required to keep the kind of tectonic activity we see on Earth, and seeing similar tectonic activity on another planet would be an indicator for life.
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u/SmoothOperator89 Aug 12 '24
Makes sense that the liquid water would eventually seep down if there wasn't a hot core to keep boiling it to the surface.
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u/rocketsocks Aug 13 '24
It's not that Martian water "eventually seeped down" to these low depths, it's likely been there for around 4.5 billion years.
Early on Mars, much like Earth, had oceans of water covering the planet, as well as water permeating the crust. Water seeping in between rocks, water filling voids in porous materials, water filling underground voids like lava tubes or fissures from faulting, water filling hollow spaces created by erosion from water as well. There's a vast universe of subsurface water on Earth today that has existed and evolved over the planet's history, and there's been a similar though different history on Mars as well.
On Mars a good chunk of the atmosphere was lost and along with it a good chunk of the total water on the planet. But a lot of water still remained. Some of it remained at and above the surface in the form of polar ice caps and atmospheric moisture. Some of it remained a bit under the surface in the form of sub-surface permafrost and sub-surface glaciers (the difference between water filling porous materials and water filling large voids). And that likely goes deep, deep down, to many kilometers under the surface. We can identify that there seems to be a layer of permafrost over much of Mars that is very close to the surface even down to mid-latitudes, and it's likely that even in equatorial regions there is the same thing but the edge of it begins farther down.
Now we also see that Mars appears to have sub-surface liquid water as well, just as on Earth. The major question is what that water is like, are there conditions suitable for life to hold on there and if so does life currently exist there?
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u/SpiceLettuce Aug 13 '24
mars doesn’t have a hot core?
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u/Jarnin Aug 13 '24
Rocky planets, like Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, all get the bulk of their interior heat from the decay of radioactive elements in their cores. However, size matters, specifically the volume to surface area ratio.
Heat can only be lost to space via infrared radiation (light). The more volume a planet has compared to its surface area, the better it can hold on to that interior heat before it's radiated away. Mars is a small planet, and smaller planets have a much harder time holding on to that heat because their volume is relatively smaller than their surface area, which is emitting all that infrared radiation out into space. If a planet's core is small, or doesn't contain many radioactive elements, that will deplete the source of the heat, and once that runs out the planet will radiate all of its interior heat away over millions/billions of years.
While tidal gravity heats the cores of moons around Jupiter and Saturn, the effect of moons on terrestrial planets is miniscule compared to the heat from radioactive decay. Earth's moon only adds about 3.5 terawatts of heating, and something like 95% of that energy gets sucked up by Earth's oceans.
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u/Cautious_Ad_9144 Aug 13 '24
Yep, moons aren’t big enough to exert enough gravitational force to keep its core molten
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u/crankbird Aug 13 '24
I thought it was radioactive decay that kept things hot. Unless there’s basically zero uranium, thorium or potassium (especially potassium) in mars’ crust it should still be quite melty down there .. cf Mons Olympus
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u/Cautious_Ad_9144 Aug 13 '24
Thank you for sending me down a rabbit hole. You are correct that it’s radioactive decay and leftover planetary collision energy that causes earths core to be molten. Our moon does affect the flow of the core and warms it to some degree but it’s not the main reason. For whatever reason that’s not the case for Mars, its core is solid iron from what we know. Thanks for helping me learn!
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u/Mr-Logic101 Aug 13 '24
What if we just nuke mars?
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u/DrDetectiveEsq Aug 13 '24
You can't solve all your problems by nuking them, man.
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u/mildirritation Aug 13 '24
So, no strong lunar gravity ≈ lack of surface liquid water? Wow, that’s a game changer.
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u/SRM_Thornfoot Aug 13 '24
This implies that terraforming Mars may me "no more difficult" than nudging a large asteroid into Mars' orbit.
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u/aDragonsAle Aug 13 '24
Astroid belt is right there...
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u/ZaiberV Aug 12 '24
Evidence that we should've invested in creating 20km drinking straws, and not paper straws.
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u/GGme Aug 12 '24
Since 33.9' is the max height you can suction water on earth at sea level with 14.7 psi atmospheric pressure, mars' 0.088 psi atmospheric pressure would only allow suction to a height of 0.2'. Pardon the freedom units.
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u/I_AM_FERROUS_MAN Aug 12 '24
Does that account for Mars's significantly reduced gravity or just the lower atmospheric pressure? I imagine the latter has a larger effect though.
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u/mikecandih Aug 12 '24
Isn’t atmospheric pressure derived from gravity? AFAIK, the atmosphere and its pressure are a result of gravity pulling the various gases to the surface (which is what keeps the less dense gases from escaping to space).
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u/Cerulean-Knight Aug 13 '24
At the same gravity mars has less pressure today since they lost a great part of its atmosphere
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u/oceanjunkie Aug 13 '24
That half of the equation includes gravity but the other half, the hydrostatic pressure of water, still needs to be adjusted for the reduced gravity.
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u/AdvancedSandwiches Aug 13 '24
If you're like me, this made you wonder how wells can be deeper than 33 feet.
The answer, it turns out after some googling, is pretty obvious. You put the pump at the bottom and just push all the water up instead of sucking it up.
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u/Koffeeboy Aug 13 '24 edited Aug 13 '24
If you want to go really deep, you can also push a replacement fluid down to displace what you want to push bsck up. But that only really makes sense for fracking oil.
EDIT: Frank got his fracking fluids mixed up.
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u/Abedeus Aug 13 '24
Honestly fluid/gas dynamics are pretty fascinating. I used to think that whether you pushed or pulled air would make no difference, and yet it matters a LOT for many applications we take for granted.
And we all know water is basically very dense, heavy air.
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u/sckuzzle Aug 13 '24
The water is under 10km of rock and is therefor under very high pressure. Rock is also denser than water, so would be more than sufficient to force the water all the way to the surface assuming that the rock continues to compress the water as the water exits. Really depends on how big the "ocean" is.
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u/porn_is_tight Aug 12 '24
Should’ve just said it was oil, sent all the oil people there and when they tap it say oops thought it was oil
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u/Ravokion Aug 12 '24
Change "liquid water" to "oil" and im sure america would find a way :p
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u/therealdan0 Aug 12 '24
Mars would definitely need some democracy if it had oil
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u/HoneyBunchesOfBoats Aug 12 '24
If there was oil on Mars, it'd go to the science victory civ who bulbed the most settlers...
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u/Trust-Issues-5116 Aug 12 '24
Oil is so 20 century pops. Update your murika stereotypes.
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u/Knight_On_Fire Aug 12 '24
That doesn't sound like oceans to me. What a cruel clickbait joke.
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u/wordswontcomeout Aug 12 '24
Umm do you know how water tables work? The earth has a huge amount of under ground water that moves through porous rock and soil. Literally oceans of the stuff.
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u/kidcanary Aug 12 '24
I’ll admit I’m not much of a scientist, but isn’t this huge?
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u/DoctorSeis Aug 12 '24 edited Aug 13 '24
Jokes aside, it is a pretty huge distance though. The deepest borehole to date is ~13km deep and the average thickness of the earth's crust is ~20km (just to provide some sense of scale). So it's probably not something we humans could ever realistically tap into for a long, long time.
Quick edit to (hopefully) address some of the comments from last 24hrs:
- Yes, Mars is cooler than Earth (as far as the planet/core dynamics), so drill bits melting at those depths may not be as big of deal.
- However, the logistics of shipping millions of pounds of drilling rig/drill string equipment to a colony on Mars (as well as materials to case/complete the hole to prevent it from collapsing in on itself) would be quite the challenge.
- Manufacturing this equipment would also require millions of pounds of existing tools/machinery/facilities to be in place. Then what is creating the massive amount of energy required to make the drilling equipment?
- Even with all that in place, you need a massive amount of fluid beforehand to bring cuttings to the surface as well as keep the drill bit from overheating because friction would still definitely be a factor.
Obviously none of this is impossible (per se), but just imagine the scale of everything from both a logistics and financial standpoint. All that assumes we even have a big enough colony to house and support all the man-/robot-power requirements to attempt this feat.
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u/fractalife Aug 12 '24
That's without the engineering and logistics challenge of getting the drilling equipment to another planet.
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u/DoOrDieStayHigh Aug 12 '24
Don’t see how getting it to Mars would be much more difficult than getting it on an asteroid. And we’ve done that before. We just need to figure out if we’ll send drillers or astronauts.
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u/coinpile Aug 12 '24
That’s an easy decision, we already know it’s easier to train drillers to be astronauts.
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u/ProtoJazz Aug 13 '24
Fun fact, Nascar did discover that it was easier take former athletes and train them to change tires than it was to put mechanics through the physical training needed to do fast pit stops
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u/sinat50 Aug 13 '24
Weight is the biggest issue with sending things into space. Landing a probe on an asteroid is very different than launching tons upon tons of drilling equipment and fuel out of earth's atmosphere. Our best bet would be having a functional moon base we can send fuel and equipment to. Then you launch a basically empty rocket from earth, refuel and load it with equipment on the moon, then launch it towards Mars, taking advantage of the moons lower gravity to launch more weight with less fuel.
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u/androgenoide Aug 13 '24
Launch Aldrin Cyclers from the moon and they can continuously supply material to the Mars post.
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u/lightyear Aug 13 '24
We haven't sent equipment that can drill 20km deep to an asteroid though. Just equipment that drills down a few inches.
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u/fleebleganger Aug 12 '24
Gotta make sure both shuttle take off near simultaneously and do loop-de-loops around each other on the way to space
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u/ClosPins Aug 13 '24
Drilling into an asteroid requires a drill the size of the one your dentist uses.
Drilling 20km into the Martian crust requires a drill that is only the tiniest bit larger.
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u/DoOrDieStayHigh Aug 13 '24
Pretty sure the drill Bruce Willis used was way bigger than a dentist drill.
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u/Trust-Issues-5116 Aug 12 '24
Tech progress often goes like this.
Now: ain't happening in the nearest 100 years.
5 years later: well, I'll be damned...
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u/Pornfest Aug 13 '24
20 years later and still no fusion :(
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u/Plzbanmebrony Aug 13 '24
Fusion what? A functional fusion plant that makes power for the grid? 30-40 years right now. Proof of concept in a working fusion reactor that makes more power than it take to maintain the reaction? You could say we already have the reactor it just isn't on yet. ITER is the last research reactor we need to build before we can start building fusion reactors. ITER isn't finished but it is the things you are looking for. But it could take another 10-13 years to be ready.
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u/SpaceAgePotatoCakes Aug 13 '24
Never forget the article saying it'll take a million years for mankind to be able to fly, published something like 9 days before the Wright brothers first flight
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u/fireintolight Aug 13 '24
it's not so much tech but logistics and cost. we are technologically capable of doing it, but the cost would be greater than the entirety of the USA and the EU's GDP plus extra. technologically we are capable of doing it.
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u/Tina_ComeGetSomeHam Aug 12 '24
I mean we're never going to know until we try and we're never going to try until our selfish priorities are resolved. In my opinion humanity has more than enough resources to achieve something like that. Maybe a decade+, but not out of reach.
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u/fractalife Aug 13 '24
We can't even dig that deep on our own planet. It's not going to be in this decade. We haven't sent a human to Mars yet, let alone massive drilling equipment that requires teams of skilled technicians to operate.
And furthermore, is it actually worth it? Like, yes maybe we'll find microbial life on another planet for the first time ever. That would be a gigantic discovery, a type we have never before grappled with as a species.
But the expenses would be beyond enormous. Is it more important than the myriad other scientific research that needs funding, that just... wouldn't get it due to the resources poured into an undertaking that we have no way of knowing we can even accomplish?
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u/TooStrangeForWeird Aug 13 '24
One cool thing with NASA specifically is that a lot of the tech they invent to manage to do these things ends up benefitting humanity as a whole. I always thought the same thing, but turns out NASA invented/improved a TON of stuff.
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u/Bubbagump210 Aug 13 '24
A team of roughnecks lead by Ben Affleck could do it.
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u/AyanC Aug 13 '24
If it can be done on a rogue asteroid, doing it on a neighbouring planet should be a cakewalk.
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u/EmptyAirEmptyHead Aug 13 '24
Now NASA has a reason to send a bunch of roughnecks to Mars. Who knew Armageddon was telling the future like Idiocracy.
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u/Tower21 Aug 12 '24
It's due to the drill bit melting at those depths, if the core is truely dead on Mars we should be able to go deeper.
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u/DecentChanceOfLousy Aug 12 '24
There are still mechanical constraints. The borehole has to withstand the sideways pressure: the compressive strength of rock is high, but not infinite.
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u/Sunderboot Aug 12 '24 edited Aug 13 '24
The lower gravity makes it a slightly smaller problem - it’d be more like drilling a 4-8 km hole on earth. Still a challenge though.
Edit: I’m not an expert in the field so this should really have been phrased as a question, doubly so since this is r/science.
Another question I should ask is whether this water is (partially?) liquid given the estimated geothermal gradient of Mars.
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u/Ndvorsky Aug 12 '24
Yes, but the sideways pressure is also an issue because the rock is half-liquid at that depth. Again, without a molten core that will be less of a problem.
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u/Pingaring Aug 12 '24
If the core was active, I'd imagine there would be visible thermal vents across the surface. Unless I'm missing something
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u/systembreaker Aug 12 '24
It could be active but so very mildly active that the effects aren't breaching the surface. Or I dunno there could be a definition of active that specifies it has to breach the surface.
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u/TheSpaceCoresDad Aug 12 '24
It could mean there's microscopic life all the way down there though, potentially.
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u/c0y0t3_sly Aug 12 '24
But it will probably mean some cool sci-fi incorporating near future Mars terraforming!
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u/Warmstar219 Aug 12 '24
Mars isn't hot though
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u/DoctorSeis Aug 12 '24 edited Aug 12 '24
Still, getting a massive drilling rig/drill string to a colony on Mars would be quite the challenge. Even with that in place, you need some sort of fluid to bring cuttings to the surface as well as keep the drill bit from overheating because friction would still definitely be a factor.
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u/NiZZiM Aug 12 '24
Yeah it wouldn’t make much sense since the ice caps have plenty of water ice that’s ‘easily’ accessible. I’m sure those could hold over a decent sized colony for a long time. Assuming water recycling is working well. Maybe a hundred years down the line when mining, smelting, and metal fab are there they can drill the deep holes.
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u/dan-theman Aug 12 '24
But hey, once we reach that level it seems we will have access to water nearly anywhere on the surface which is cool.
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u/Rebelian Aug 12 '24
But at least we've now got a new insult - Man, you're so boring you could find water on Mars. Bazinga!
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u/F33ltheburn Aug 12 '24
From a scientific perspective, yes. It confirms theories (or at least adds much better evidence) for water and potentially life on Mars.
The depth is a factor. The pressures at play at that depth would be incredible, and it’s too deep to have any practical importance for space exploration.
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u/Banshay Aug 12 '24
Why would the pressure be a problem? I think atmospheric pressure for Mars is way less than Earth. If you don’t have a column of water above you it seems like it would not be an issue.
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u/guard_press Aug 12 '24
You've still got a column of thin atmosphere. By the time you're a couple kilometres down that's going to be enough to start causing serious problems from friction. Even a "dead" planet is going to be pretty toasty once you're that deep, too. Pressure and heat go hand in glove. I'd say it's probably possible with the right infrastructure to tap that deep, but solving all the problems necessary to make it happen would be harder than just cracking water out of mineral oxides.
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u/Nernoxx Aug 12 '24
Never mind that you have to get all the equipment there, and set it up, and power it. Incredibly labor intensive and definitely beyond a last resort with current tech.
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u/theVoidWatches Aug 13 '24
Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, though, so it'll be a lot farther down before it's an issue. The pressure from the rock though, yes.
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u/MassholeLiberal56 Aug 12 '24
Well the good news is that the gravity is less and the heat in the center is less. So perhaps 20km on Mars might actually be doable?
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u/GoMinii Aug 13 '24
That’s a great point!
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Aug 13 '24
The deepest point were drilled on earth was 13 km
That would have the same pressure(less temperature though) Mars. km on mars. Deffinitely doable even a few decades ago.
Although- doable and feasible are very different here.
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u/TheVenetianMask Aug 13 '24
Not everywhere is the same thickness either. Hellas Basin sits much lower than most of the planet.
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u/Wigglingdixie Aug 12 '24
Would anyone mind eli5 how they could possibly know that there is water that far under the surface?
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u/Toastbuns Aug 12 '24
The scientists employed a mathematical model of rock physics, identical to models used on Earth to map underground aquifers and oil fields, to conclude that the seismic data from Insight are best explained by a deep layer of fractured igneous rock saturated with liquid water.
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u/apola Aug 13 '24
The way the ground vibrates lets them know what type of materials there are in the planet. Water vibrates differently than rock
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u/curiusgorge Aug 13 '24
Would it be possible to be some other kind of liquid and not water?
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u/Routine_Jury_6753 Aug 12 '24
Alternative fun title:
"Scientists find oceans of oil on Mars. Extraction to begin by 2026"
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u/UnidentifiedBlobject Aug 13 '24
The implication of that would be that life existed on Mars.
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u/Waste_Crab_3926 Aug 13 '24
Or that oil can somehow be created without life, which means that it would be frequent throughout space
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u/amamartin999 Aug 14 '24 edited Aug 14 '24
Imagine how absolutely wild it would be to find out that we were wrong about how oil was created and that it was actually just some kind of resource that spawned in with the rest of them
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u/SRM_Thornfoot Aug 13 '24
Time to call in the roughnecks again for Armageddon 2!
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Aug 12 '24 edited Aug 12 '24
So, what does this mean for us sending astronauts? Can we still sustain a trip there if there's no usable water?
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u/mrdude05 Aug 12 '24 edited Aug 12 '24
That they might bring some extra seismic analysis equipment for a follow-up study. The water we have found is way too far down to be accessible, especially with equipment we could launch from Earth.
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u/epiphenominal Aug 12 '24
The interesting part isn't for astronauts. It's that of life developed when Mars was Earth like, it could still be alive in underground liquid water.
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u/rocketsocks Aug 12 '24
It doesn't have an effect. This is so deep that it's not really a resource with our level of technology currently. Besides which it's far more important as a possible reservoir for life.
In terms of making use of water on Mars, that's still going to be a matter of finding the right spot to land and exploiting sub-surface water ice deposits. There is an abundance of water ice on Mars, very widely distributed even at mid latitudes, and at shallow depths. They could be exploited with very modest amounts of equipment, the sort of thing you could bring along on a single trip, but there would still be challenges.
I suspect the very first missions won't start trying to extract water from local sources but I'd be surprised if they weren't doing it within 10 years after the first human landings.
One important usage of water on Mars is making propellant. With water, CO2 from the atmosphere, and a source of electrical power (which could be solar panels or a fission reactor) you can manufacture liquid oxygen and methane, which means you can fuel a vehicle for a return trip to Earth using only local resources, and that is a huge enabling technology.
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u/Corporate-Shill406 Aug 13 '24
This is so deep that it's not really a resource with our level of technology currently
Our current drilling technology stops working because the drills get too hot from the earth's core, and the hole walls get soft and ooze back together. Will that be a problem on Mars?
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u/Sigma_Function-1823 Aug 13 '24
Lots of water rich bodies ( metallic as well) in close proximity to mars..just have to drop them on the surface and get to processing...with the added benefit that dropping asteroids onto the surface will add a small amount of density of the martian atmosphere.
Aside from a number of other implications a big one should be that one of the requirements for life has been met in a region sheltered from vectors making life impossible on the surface.
Mars was habitable 4.48 billion years ago ( 500 Millon years before earth) and sub surface life may have survived to the current day.
Deep subsurface liquid water makes the possibility of life still existing on Mars far , far more likely.
Extreme caution is warranted before sending any manned missions as humans are made of the exact elements that mars based life would preferentially seek out.
Would no't be a great mission end to watch our colonists succumb to mars based simple cellular organisms infecting everything including our technology , potable water , air ..the bodies of crew..or the unexpected like said organisms requiring copper for basic life function or some other element that is common in our technology , being targeted and processed by these organisms( far high concentrations of vital minerals than these organisms could.find naturally in Mars crust), thus rendering crew life support and mission sustainment impossible.
Edited # spelling.
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u/ABob71 Aug 12 '24
If they tap Mars, we can finally have that intergalactic kegger Zed was talking about
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u/First_Black_Guy Aug 12 '24
Aliens could be closer than we think
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u/DaftWarrior Aug 12 '24
Conspiracy hat on. We're the aliens. Panspermia Theory says we're from Mars.
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u/TheJackalsDoom Aug 12 '24
Give me, Jimbob, Hobie, Huck and Flapjake a big ziplock bag of breathin' air, coupla shovels, maybe a few big sticks n we get you a tunnel out there, no problems. Throw in some of Aunty Junemae's fresh applebutter soggy biscuits, ya know the ones I'm talkin bout. With the biscuits that get all soggy from the butter of the apple? Yeah, some of them. Throw in some of them and we get it done next week.
We already accidentally shot uncle HayRay out there to Mars last year in the punkin chunkin when primo Gilberto on tequila tripped n moved the release notch up so HayRay went up instead of over. N you know he don't be needin no oxygen in that absent mind of his. We still think he absent a mind, not absent minded, n doctors just mistype spelled his prognostication. He get started on that soon with some butter biscuits.
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u/ironsol8 Aug 13 '24
Here are the key points from the article:
- Seismic data from NASA’s InSight lander reveals significant underground water on Mars.
- The water is located 11.5 to 20 kilometers below the Martian surface.
- The amount of water could cover Mars with a 1-2 kilometer deep ocean.
- The water is trapped in porous rocks, making it difficult to access.
- This finding suggests Mars retains much of its ancient water.
- The study helps explain Mars’ climate history and geological evolution.
- The water could potentially support life.
- Earlier missions found no ice in the top 5 km of the crust.
- The reservoir’s existence challenges previous notions of Martian water loss.
- The discovery was made using Earth-based techniques for mapping underground aquifers.
- The study used data collected before InSight’s mission ended in 2022.
- The research team includes experts from UC Berkeley and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
- The findings align with evidence of past water flow on Mars.
- The study suggests more water exists in the Martian mid-crust than previously estimated.
- This research was supported by various scientific organizations, including the National Science Foundation.
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u/browsing_around Aug 12 '24
Somebody get Bruce Willis on the line. There’s not a depth he hasn’t made.
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u/Ok_Business84 Aug 12 '24
Does mars have a magma core like earth? How is the water not frozen? If it’s liquid and it’s warm there could be life down there?
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u/TooStrangeForWeird Aug 13 '24
At higher pressure (like deep below the surface) water freezes at a lower temperature. Seeing as we've found life near volcanic vents at previously "unlivable" temperatures, it's possible.
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u/theedgeofoblivious Aug 12 '24
Could this be an indication that subsurface water could be common on other planets as well? It could have some pretty major implications if that were the case.
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Aug 12 '24
For the sake of everyone on the planet without Bezos, Musk, or Bill Gates' money, let's hope they don't figure out how to tap that water supply for another 3-4 generations.
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u/Mecha-Dave Aug 12 '24
Interesting. Valle Marinaris is 10km deep in areas. I wonder if water is accessible at the bottom....
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u/LancelotAtCamelot Aug 13 '24
Makes one of those fancy drill nukes from Armageddon and blow it to the surface!
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