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Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported.
In some locations, the amount of oxygen available could even keep alive a primitive, multicellular animal such as a sponge, they reported in the journal Nature Geosciences on Monday.
“We discovered that brines” — water with high concentrations of salt — “on Mars can contain enough oxygen for microbes to breathe,” said lead author Vlada Stamenkovic, a theoretical physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, United States.
“This fully revolutionises our understanding of the potential for life on Mars, today and in the past,” he said.
Up to now, it had been assumed that the trace amounts of oxygen on Mars were insufficient to sustain even microbial life.
“We never thought that oxygen could play a role for life on Mars due to its rarity in the atmosphere, about 0.14 percent,” Stamenkovic said.
By comparison, the life-enabling gas makes up 21 percent of the air we breathe. — AFP
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