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posted by mrpg on Tuesday October 10 2017, @11:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the cradle-of-life dept.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6966

The discovery of evidence for ancient sea-floor hydrothermal deposits on Mars identifies an area on the planet that may offer clues about the origin of life on Earth.

A recent international report examines observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of massive deposits in a basin on southern Mars. The authors interpret the data as evidence that these deposits were formed by heated water from a volcanically active part of the planet's crust entering the bottom of a large sea long ago.

"Even if we never find evidence that there's been life on Mars, this site can tell us about the type of environment where life may have begun on Earth," said Paul Niles of NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston. "Volcanic activity combined with standing water provided conditions that were likely similar to conditions that existed on Earth at about the same time -- when early life was evolving here."

Mars today has neither standing water nor volcanic activity. Researchers estimate an age of about 3.7 billion years for the Martian deposits attributed to seafloor hydrothermal activity. Undersea hydrothermal conditions on Earth at about that same time are a strong candidate for where and when life on Earth began. Earth still has such conditions, where many forms of life thrive on chemical energy extracted from rocks, without sunlight. But due to Earth's active crust, our planet holds little direct geological evidence preserved from the time when life began. The possibility of undersea hydrothermal activity inside icy moons such as Europa at Jupiter and Enceladus at Saturn feeds interest in them as destinations in the quest to find extraterrestrial life

Did they find any Xenon-129?

Also at BGR.

Ancient hydrothermal seafloor deposits in Eridania basin on Mars (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15978) (DX)


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  • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday October 11 2017, @10:09PM

    by krishnoid (1156) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @10:09PM (#580817)

    Seriously? This was the first thing [si.edu] that came to mind for me.

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