Martian meteorites yield clue that planet was once awash with water and perhaps life

MARS may have been entirely submerged in water, increasing the likelihood that the planet once supported life, scientists have found.

The research team discovered evidence that a mineral found in Martian meteorites may have originally contained hydrogen, meaning that at one stage there could have been more water on Mars than currently believed.

Researchers created a synthetic version of a hydrogen-containing mineral known as whitlockite.

After carrying out shock-compression experiments on whitlockite samples that simulated the conditions of ejecting meteorites from Mars, the researchers studied their microscopic makeup with X-ray experiments using top-of-the-line machinery.

Martin Kunz, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab’s ALS who participated in X-ray studies of the samples, said: “This is important for deducing how much water could have been on Mars, and whether the water was from Mars itself rather than comets or meteorites.”

Their experiments showed that whitlockite could become dehydrated from such shocks, forming merrillite, a mineral common in Martian meteorites but not natural on Earth.

Prof Oliver Tschauner, from the University of Nevada, who co-led the study, said: “If even a part of merrillite had been whitlockite before, it changes the water budget of Mars dramatically.”

Because whitlockite can be dissolved in water and contains phosphorous, an essential element for life on Earth, the study further increases the chances there could have been life on Mars.

Prof Tschauner said: “The overarching question here is about water on Mars and its early history on Mars: had there ever been an environment that enabled a generation of life on Mars?”

The pressures and temperatures generated in the shock experiments, while comparable to those of a meteorite impact, lasted for only about 100 billionths of a second, or about onetenth to one-hundredth as long as an actual meteorite impact.

Prof Tschauner added that the study appeared to be one of the first to detail the shock effects on synthetic whitlockite, which is rare on Earth.