Life on Mars: Scientists suggest looking underground for possible Martians

[Judi Lynn]

A paper suggested that space agencies may need to dig deeper during their search for life on Mars.
By Micah Ong
January 31, 2019 05:51 GMT

Finding life on Mars has been one of the goals of the missions on the Red Planet so far, but their search has never yielded any results. A study, however, suggested that we might need to dig a little deeper into Mars to find possible signs of life.

Mars missions usually only target the planet's surface if they are looking for signs of life. Spacecrafts usually search at sites where there was once water as this is a reliable indicator where life is found on Earth. In research published in the journal Nature Geoscience and presented last year at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), however, scientists suggested that there could be microbial Martians lurking not on the surface but underground.

Explorations conducted over the past decades proved that Earth had a so-called deep biosphere below its surface. This is a subsurface environment teeming with microorganisms. Based on this, researchers speculated that Mars could have its own biologically-rich zone underground as well.

Joseph Michalski, an associate professor with the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, said at the presentation of the research that maybe there was never an evolutionary push to inhabit Mars' surface. He added that it may just be our own bias established by what we know of life on Earth that we expect life on Mars to be found on its surface.

More:
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/life-mars-scientists-suggest-looking-underground-possible-martians-1666959

[Anon-C]

1. So much to grok, so little to grok from!

[wcmagumba]

2. Thou art God...

oh water brother...(or sis)...