Ancient Mars may have had an environment capable of harboring an underground world teeming with microscopic organisms, French scientists reported Monday.
October 10, 2022
Ancient Mars may have had an environment capable of harboring an underground world teeming with microscopic organisms, French scientists reported Monday.
But if they existed, these simple life forms would have altered the atmosphere so profoundly that they triggered a Martian Ice Age and snuffed themselves out, the researchers concluded.
The findings provide a bleak view of the ways of the cosmos. Life—even simple life like microbes—»might actually commonly cause its own demise,» said the study’s lead author, Boris Sauterey, now a post-doctoral researcher at Sorbonne University.
The results «are a bit gloomy, but I think they are also very stimulating.,» he said in an email. «They challenge us to rethink the way a biosphere and its planet interact.»
In a study in the journal Nature Astronomy, Sauterey and his team said they used climate and terrain models to evaluate the habitability of the Martian crust some 4 billion years ago when the red planet was thought to be flush with water and much more hospitable than today.
They surmised that hydrogen-gobbling, methane-producing microbes might have flourished just beneath the surface back then, with several inches (a few tens of centimeters) of dirt, more than enough to protect them against harsh incoming radiation.
