Oceans of liquid water discovered beneath the surface of Mars

The latest data from the Mars InSight lander reveals something truly exciting: vast reservoirs of liquid water may lie beneath the surface of the Red Planet. However, getting to them is a task that still seems impossible.

Geophysicists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego analyzed seismic data collected by InSight and concluded that at a depth of 11.5 to 20 kilometers below the surface of Mars there is a layer of fractured igneous rock filled with liquid water. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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“Understanding the water cycle on Mars is critical to understanding the evolution of climate, surface and interior,” says one of the study’s authors, geophysicist Vashan Wright.

A cutout of the Martian interior beneath NASA’s Insight lander. The top 5 kilometers of the crust appear to be dry, but a new study provides evidence for a zone of fractured rock 11.5-20 km below the surface that is full of liquid water—more than the volume proposed to have filled hypothesized ancient Martian oceans. Credit: James Tuttle Keane and Aaron Rodriquez, courtesy of Scripps Institute of Oceanography

Indeed, determining the location of water and its quantity will help scientists understand how much liquid there may have been on Mars billions of years ago and what happened to these water reserves.

One of the main mysteries of Mars is where the water that is believed to have once covered the planet’s surface has gone. There are two main hypotheses: some of the water could evaporate into space, and the other part could penetrate into the bowels of Mars.

Thanks to Mars InSight, we now have data that allows us to peer into the planet’s interior and study its internal composition.The lander, which completed its mission in December 2022, managed to collect a huge amount of data on the seismic activity of Mars.

These data, according to the researchers, indicate the presence of water in the subsurface layers of the planet, which could be a decisive factor in supporting life if it ever existed on Mars.

“Water is essential to life as we know it,” says geophysicist Michael Manga of the University of California, Berkeley. “We haven’t found evidence of life on Mars, but we now know a place that could potentially support it.”

Despite the importance of this discovery, scientists still have a lot of work to do to definitively confirm the presence of water on such a scale. Next steps in Mars exploration may include installing new seismometers and conducting more detailed studies of the planet’s crust.