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While there is water frozen at the Martian poles and evidence of vapour in the atmosphere, this is the first time liquid water has been found on the planet.
The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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By measuring how fast seismic waves travel, scientists have worked out what material they are most likely to be moving through.
“These are actually the same techniques we use to prospect for water on Earth, or to look for oil and gas,” explained Prof Michael Manga, from the University of California, Berkeley, who was involved in the research.
The analysis revealed reservoirs of water at depths of about six to 12 miles (10 to 20km) in the Martian crust.
10 to 20km? That is probably unreachable, at least for a long time.
The deepest hole drilled on Earth is the Kola Superdeep Borehole which reached 12.2km, requiring almost 20 years of operation and tons of heavy equipment.
They did also say in the article that the rover could only measure straight down from its position, so maybe not all of the water is so deep.
Hmm, that’s a good point. If we found one aquifer there might well be others, and they could be at any depth.
Of course the problem is, we’ll need to place this kind of seismic sensor around the whole planet…
I’m no astroseismologist but I feel like I’ve heard of sensors like this being on satellites like to investigate glaciers etc. though maybe 10km of rock isn’t so easily penetrated.
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Right, and that’s part of the problem with drilling. Rock does weird things at those temperatures.
Mars has less geological activity than Earth–which is like saying Xenon is less reactive than Sodium–but I imagine it does still get hot down there. Earth gets a lot of its internal heat from the decay of heavy radioactive elements, and I imagine Mars has some of the same.
Wait, it’s liquid water. There’s a lot of pressure, though, which would raise the boiling point, but it can’t be that hot, right?
I just want to say thank you for actually having someone to say other than some stupid joke to try to get fake Internet points.