NASA rover finds fresh evidence of the warm and wet past of Mars
WASHINGTON, April 17 (Reuters) - A mineral called siderite found abundantly in rock drilled by a NASA rover on the surface of Mars is providing fresh evidence of the planet's warmer and wetter ancient past when it boasted substantial bodies of water and potentially harbored life.
The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012 to explore whether Earth 's planetary neighbor was ever able to support microbial life, found the mineral in rock samples drilled at three locations in 2022 and 2023 inside Gale crater, a large impact basin with a mountain in the middle.
Make sense of the latest ESG trends affecting companies and governments with the Reuters Sustainable Switch newsletter. Sign up here.
Siderite is an iron carbonate mineral. Its presence in sedimentary rocks formed billions of years ago offers evidence that Mars once had a dense atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide, a gas that would have warmed the planet through the greenhouse effect to the point that it could sustain bodies of liquid water on its surface.
There are features on the Martian landscape that many scientists have interpreted as signs that liquid water once flowed across its surface, with potential oceans, lakes and rivers considered as possible habitats for past microbial life.
Carbon dioxide is the main climate-regulating greenhouse gas on Earth, as it is on Mars and Venus. Its presence in the atmosphere traps heat from the sun, warming the climate.
Until now, evidence indicating the Martian atmosphere previously was rich in carbon dioxide has been sparse. The hypothesis is that when the atmosphere - for reasons not fully understood - evolved from thick and rich in carbon dioxide to thin and starved of this gas, the carbon through geochemical processes became entombed in rocks in the planet's crust as a carbonate mineral.
The samples obtained by Curiosity, which drills 1.2 to 1.6 inches (3-4 centimeters) down into rock to study its chemical and mineral composition, lend weight to this notion. The samples contained up to 10.5% siderite by weight, as determined by an instrument onboard the car-sized, six-wheeled rover.
"One of the longstanding mysteries in the study of Martian planetary evolution and habitability is: if large amounts of carbon dioxide were required to warm the planet and stabilize liquid water, why are there so few detections of carbonate minerals on the Martian surface?" said University of Calgary geochemist Benjamin Tutolo, a participating scientist on NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover team and lead author of the study published on Thursday in the journal Science, opens new tab.
"Models predict that carbonate minerals should be widespread. But, to date, rover-based investigations and satellite-based orbital surveys of the Martian surface had found little evidence of their presence," Tutolo added.
Because rock similar to that sampled by the rover has been identified globally on Mars, the researchers suspect it too contains an abundance of carbonate minerals and may hold a substantial portion of the carbon dioxide that once warmed Mars.
The Gale crater sedimentary rocks - sandstones and mudstones - are thought to have been deposited around 3.5 billion years ago, when this was the site of a lake and before the Martian climate underwent a dramatic change.
"The shift of Mars' surface from more habitable in the past, to apparently sterile today, is the largest-known environmental catastrophe," said planetary scientist and study co-author Edwin Kite of the University of Chicago and Astera Institute.
"We do not know the cause of this change, but Mars has a very thin carbon dioxide atmosphere today, and there is evidence that the atmosphere was thicker in the past. This puts a premium on understanding where the carbon went, so discovering a major unsuspected deposit of carbon-rich materials is an important new clue," Kite added.
The rover's findings offer insight into the carbon cycle on ancient Mars.
On Earth, volcanoes spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and the gas is absorbed by surface waters - mainly the ocean - and combines with elements such as calcium to form limestone rock. Through the geological process called plate tectonics, this rock is reheated and the carbon is ultimately released again into the atmosphere through volcanism. Mars, however, lacks plate tectonics.
"The important feature of the ancient Martian carbon cycle that we outline in this study is that it was imbalanced. In other words, substantially more carbon dioxide seems to have been sequestered into the rocks than was subsequently released back into the atmosphere," Tutolo said.
"Models of Martian climate evolution can now incorporate our new analyses, and in turn, help to refine the role of this imbalanced carbon cycle in maintaining, and ultimately losing, habitability over Mars' planetary history," Tutolo added.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
a day ago
- BBC News
Unsung indigenous women behind moon landing celebrated in art
More than a thousand unsung women whose circuits helped man land on the moon have inspired two Kent artists to celebrate the historic moment of work is based on the female Navajo weavers who were employed for their perceived dexterity to make microchips in New Mexico in the sixties, which were used by NASA in the Apollo Guidance Landing is by weaver Margo Selby and composer Helen Caddick is a 16m (52ft) handwoven textile suspended from The Trinity Chapel of Canterbury Cathedral, accompanied by an original score for six tapestry is described as a celebration of the crossover of mathematical patterns, tone and rhythm found in weaving and music and will remain in the chapel until 31 August. Ms Caddick said she was inspired by a weaving tool to compose music about space said: "I had gone to see Margo weave and I noticed that she used a shuttle to move the thread along and that made me start to think about space."She added that when she had saw documentaries or films about the space shuttle, she noticed there was an "indicator light flashing in the cabin"."So so I took the rhythm of that to mirror in the harp part," she turn, Ms Selby translated the musician's work into textile art. The textile artist said: "With these incredible carvings and shapes, to see my contemporary work hanging alongside them is truly thrilling." Some 1,200 indigenous people - mostly women - were employed to work at a Fairchild Semiconductor factory in Shiprock, New Mexico, from 1965, during the United States' race to the moon. The manufacturer was tasked with building complicated microchips for NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer, which was integral to space missions. A contemporary brochure from Fairchild compared the intricate work creating elaborate microchips to weaving the Navajo population's traditional tapestries. However, these women who contributed to the space race were largely overlooked in their time. The Dean of Canterbury Cathedral David Monteith said the chapel was excited to celebrate the work of art. "In life sometimes things can become a bit grey scale but this is such an assault of colour that it gladdens the heart and that's such a gift," he said.
Reuters
a day ago
- Reuters
Magnitude 6 earthquake strikes off coast of Hokkaido, Japan, GFZ says
June 21 (Reuters) - A Magnitude 6 earthquake struck off coast of Hokkaido, Japan on Sunday, the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) said. The quake was at a depth of 10 km (6.21 miles), GFZ said.
Times
2 days ago
- Times
My famous father — the fraudulent, fantasist scientist
'When I was small,' Joanne Briggs writes touchingly. 'I believed my dad to be the only man who knew all science.' Michael Briggs had all but disappeared from her life in the early 1970s when she was seven after walking out on her mother, but she would correct anyone who showed pity for her as a fatherless child. Dad hadn't gone, she would tell them, he was just in another country being a very famous scientist in the fields of space, and poisons, and having babies. 'Anything you can think of, really, he's an expert in it.' She wasn't the only one to have this inflated view of her father's expertise. Indeed, the scientific establishment shared it, at least for a while. Michael was a Nasa space scientist turned pharmacologist, a renowned specialist in biochemistry, an adviser to the World Health Organisation and a university dean of sciences. He had written papers on topics ranging from human hormones to meteorites and intergalactic travel. The son of a typewriter mechanic from Manchester, he was a self-made man, bouncing round the world from Australia to Pasadena, taking on ever more prestigious positions, pushing at the boundaries of the scientific imagination and 'grabbing hold of everything the Jet Age had to offer'.
