Lake detected on Mars raises possibility of life

There’s water on Mars. For the first time, scientists have detected a lake of salty water under the Martian ice, a study released Wednesday said. The lake is about a mile under the surface and 12 miles across.

The presence of water under Martian polar ice caps has been suspected but unseen until now, the study said.

The discovery raises the possibility of finding life on the Red Planet. “Without water, no form of life as we know it could exist,” said Anja Diez of the Norwegian Polar Institute.

Astronomers used radar data from the orbiting European spacecraft Mars Express to find the water. They spent at least two years checking over the data to make sure they had detected water.

“I really have no other explanation,” said study lead author Roberto Orosei of Italy’s National Institute of Astrophysics in Bologna. “This is just one small study area; it is an exciting prospect to think there could be more of these underground pockets of water elsewhere, yet to be discovered.”

The discovery could offer fresh clues about how Earth’s neighbor so profoundly transformed billions of years ago from a warmer, wetter world to its freeze-dried state today, according to Scientific American.

Cassie Stuurman, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, said that “if these researchers are right, this is the first time we’ve found evidence of a large water body on Mars.”

The area is similar to that of lakes found beneath the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets on Earth, which also were detected using radar scans.

The study was published Wednesday in the journal Science.