Is There Life Deep Underground on Mars?

It’s been a great month for planetary science.  Scientists first discovered the chemical signature of phosphine on Venus, then found additional underground lakes on Mars.  While no life has been conclusively found yet, science continues to take incremental steps toward proving what could be one of the most impactful discoveries in history: that we are not alone.

But in order to definitively prove that, science will have to conclusively find life first.  The methods for doing so will differ dramatically based on whether the location is in the clouds of Venus or under the ice of Mars.  Scientists have come up with a model to understand the conditions for any life to exist in the subsurface oceans of not only Mars, but any rocky body with underground liquid water.

The theoretical work, done by Dr. Manasvi Lingam at Florida Institute of Technology and Abraham Loeb of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard, describes a model that uses well-established parameters for life. These include the thermal limits of life as we know it, the size of the object being studied, its surface temperature, and the amount of radionuclides available on the object.  The outcome of the model is the size of an expected sub-surface habitable region.

Water map of Mars made by the Mars Odyssey Gamma Ray Spectrometer – Credit: NASA

This type of model has been described once before, back in 2013 when a team from the UK first proposed the idea.  However, there were some additional constraints missing from that original analysis that the new paper hopes to tackle.

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