Extremophiles instruct us that life is found in unlikely places , which is why scientist are trying to expand our definition of what a inhabitable surround is . This ancient Martian vent could be a prime good example .
Above : A untrue - color view of Arsia Mons on Mars , include braided fluvial channel ( seen in insert ) from glacial deposit made 210 million years ago . Credit : NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center / Arizona State University / Brown University
touch Arsia Mons . It ’s the third - tallest volcano on the Red Planet and one of the largest volcanoes we know of in the solar system of rules .
New research express that a combining of eruption and a glacier on its northwesterly side could have form something called “ englacial lakes ” , which is water that is created inside glaciers . ( The researchers compare this to “ liquid bubbles in a half - frozen ice cube . ” ) These in essence would have been massive , on the Holy Order of hundreds of cubic miles .
“ This is interesting because it ’s a way to get a lot of liquid water very of late on Mars , ” put forward Kat Scanlon , a graduate educatee at Brown who led the inquiry , adding that she is also interested to see if sign of a habitable environment rick up in even old regions , of 2.5 billion years old or more .
“ There ’s been a lot of work on Earth — though not as much as we would like — on the types of microbes that be in these englacial lake , ” Scanlon lend . “ They ’ve been studied principally as an analogue to [ Saturn ’s moon ] Europa , where you ’ve get an total major planet that ’s an ice covered lake . ”
While the glacial ice idea is not novel — it ’s been talked about since the 1970s — Scanlon ’s team pushed the research forward by get in fresh selective information from NASA ’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter .
( Artist Illustration of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter )
“ Scanlon found pillow lava formations , similar to those that form on Earth when lava erupts at the bottom of an ocean , ” Brown University stated .
“ She also found the variety of ridges and mound that form on Earth when a lava current is encumber by glacial ice . The pressure of the ice shroud restrain the lava flow , and polar meltwater chills the erupting lava into sherd of volcanic glass , forming mounds and ridges with steep sides and prostrate tops . The analytic thinking also plough up evidence of a river formed in a jökulhlaup , a monolithic flood that pass when water trapped in a glacier break free . ”
Scanlon estimate that two of the “ sedimentation ” would have had lake of 9.6 three-dimensional miles ( 40 cubic km ) each , while a third would have had 4.8 cubic mil ( 20 cubic kilometers ) . They could have stayed liquid for 100 or perhaps thousands of years .
That ’s a curt period in the story of spirit , but Scanlon ’s team says it could have been enough for microbes to colonize the locations , if microbes were on Mars in the first stead .
This articleoriginally appearedat Universe Today .
AstrobiologyExtremophilesMarsScienceSpace
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