Groundbreaking discovery reveals massive underground water reserves on Mars, but accessing this vital resource poses significant challenges for future Martian colonies.
A Breach of the Martian Water Cycle
For the first time, geophysicists have found a long-standing underground reservoir of what appears to be liquid water on Mars that could potentially give its ARES surface oceans. This discovery, based in data from the NASA InSight lander on its way to Mars, helps clear up our understanding of the planet’s geological history and availability of current water resources.
The volume of groundwater the researchers say may be locked in rocks like these could literally fill every aquifer on Earth to a depth of (somewhere) between 1 and 2 kilometers deep, says Michael Manga from Berkeley. This is a fairly important result:Daniapour and Keating’s study confirms that many of the oceans on Mars did not succumb to escape into interplanetary space, but instead found their way deep inside Mars. The Martian water cycle fundamentally controls the evolution of the Martian climate, surface and interior.
Unconventional settings such as the subsurface reservoir pose several challenges when trying to recover hydrocarbons.
Although the discovery of this immense supply of water on Mars is obviously thrilling, it will be prohibitively difficult for future Martian colonists to obtain and utilitize. Within these rocks, the reservoir sits in thousands of tiny cracks (smaller than 45 microns) and pores within the granite that make up the upper three to six miles of Mars’ crust. Here on Earth, we consider it an impressive task to drill that far, much less in the harsh and totally unwelcoming Martian environment.
The water is also widely dispersed within fractured igneous rock (as opposed to stored in a concentrated, easily accessed form). It is the reason why is it really hard to draw and even filter some water for human consumption. Perhaps of more interest to researchers is the fact that, while deep groundwater may be a hopeful place to look for life on Mars, it does not present much practical use at all under current conditions because so little of it ever reaches the surface.
Conclusion
This discovery of such huge underground water reserves on Mars represents a major milestone not just in our comprehension of the geological history of the planet but the future for life. Nevertheless, the logistical hurdles that come with getting to and using this water resource hinder any real Mars colonization drive. While we work to uncover Mars’s many secrets, the overarching aim will continue to be to identify other, more reachable waters and other necessary resources for human life on this cold little planet.
