Researchers revealed in a study on the possibility of housing Mars More than 3.7 billion years ago, the Red Planet may have been home to microbes that feed on hydrogen and produce methane, just like the early Earth, and previous evidence suggested that Mars once had favorable conditions for the development of life.
According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, a team of international researchers has analyzed the interaction between the primordial environment on Mars and an ecosystem of microorganisms called methanogenic hydrogen, which eats hydrogen and produces methane.
These microorganisms are among the oldest life forms on our planet and the study simulations predict that the Martian crust was a habitable place for this ecosystem, provided the surface was not entirely covered with ice, and could have produced biomass similar to that which is found in the first ocean Earth.
The actions of these microbes would have triggered reactions with the climate on Mars, cooling it globally to over 446 degrees Fahrenheit (230 degrees Celsius) and creating less habitable conditions near the surface, said researchers led by the University of Arizona.
This would force microbes to gradually move within the planet’s crust, they added. Looking ahead, the authors identified three sites – Hellas Planitia, Isidis Planitia, and Jezero Crater – as the best places to look for signs of this early life. from methane near the surface of Mars.
“The spatial projections of our projections point to low- to mid-latitude lowland sites as good candidates for detecting traces of this early life on or near the surface,” the researchers wrote.
