The study found that Mars still has oceans buried beneath the surface

Billions of years ago, geological evidence indicates that the cold, arid red planet was much more blue. Sufficient water has been collected in lagoons, lakes and deep oceans to cover the entire planet in an ocean 100 to 1,500 meters deep. This is approximately half the Earth’s Atlantic Ocean.

The question is, what exactly happened to all that water?

While some water is frozen in the polar caps of Mars, Scientists have previously suggested that water flowing on Mars ends up in space due to the planet’s low gravity. And although some of the water left Mars that way, A new study, supported by NASA, says that much of its water remains on the planet and stuck in its crust.

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“The escape from the atmosphere does not fully explain the data we have on how much water was actually present on Mars in the past,” said author Eva Schiller. Released In Science magazine, he said.

How researchers estimated water Mars

In addition to analyzing meteorites, Schiller and colleagues used data from Mars rovers and orbiting vehicles to study how much water is present on the red planet. First, how much you lose over time.

One way to do this is to analyze the levels of hydrogen in the atmosphere and in the rocks of a planet. Water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, but the hydrogen atoms are not the same. Most of them contain only one proton in the nucleus of the atom, while the “heavy” hydrogen contains an additional neutron.

NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Ordinary hydrogen has little difficulty escaping the gravitational pull of the heaviest deuterium on a planet. Thus, the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen (D / H) in the planet’s atmosphere reflects the loss of Martian water.

“It is clear that escaping from the atmosphere plays an important role in the loss of water, but the results of the last decade of Mars missions have shown that there is this huge reservoir of ancient water minerals, the formation of which has definitely reduced the availability of water over time. . ”Bethany Ellman, Teacher. Planetary Sciences and Associate Director of the Keck Institute for Space Studies.

When water and rocks come together, a process called chemical weathering can occur to form clays and other minerals in the water As part of its metallic structure.

While Mars is still trapped between 30 and 99 percent of its water in the earth’s crust, Schiller warns that it will not be easy for future astronauts to extract the water easily for their use.

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