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Monday, October 22, 2018
Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life, study says
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleSalty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers report.
In some locations, the amount of oxygen available could even keep alive a primitive, multicellular animal, such as a sponge, they report in the journal Nature Geosciences.
“This fully revolutionizes our understanding of the potential for life on Mars, today and in the past,” he tells AFP.
Up to now, it had been assumed that the trace amounts of oxygen on Mars were insufficient to sustain even microbial life.
“We never thought that oxygen could play a role for life on Mars due to its rarity in the atmosphere, about 0.14 percent,” Vlada Stamenkovic, a theoretical physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Stamenkovic says.
By comparison, the life-giving gas makes up 21 percent of the air we breathe.
On Earth, aerobic — that is, oxygen breathing — life forms evolved together with photosynthesis, which converts CO2 into O2. The gas played a critical role in the emergence of complex life, notable after the so-called Great Oxygenation Event some 2.35 billion years ago.
But our planet also harbors microbes — at the bottom of the ocean, in boiling hotsprings — that subsist in environments deprived of oxygen.
“That’s why — whenever we thought of life on Mars — we studied the potential for anaerobic life,” Stamenkovic says.
— AFP
The Times of Israel Community.