Marsquakes unveil potential liquid water traces beneath martian surface!
Mars has been for long considered to be the planet that is the most similar to Earth. Perhaps, this is the reason scientists have been tirelessly working towards gathering more details about the red planet, in the hope it would be habitable. Finding water on the planet has been a long pursuit in this direction.
It seems the red planet could have been once blue owing to the presence of oceans on its surface. However, the planet may still hold liquid water underground, in the depths which is virtually hard to explore.
Scientists from Penn State University suggest that if there is liquid water on Mars today, it could well be way too deep underground to be detected with conventional methods used on Earth. However, they say that listening to quakes that occur on the planet—dubbed marsquakes–– could prove to be a new tool to detect liquid water.
According to Roth, if marsquakes pass through the subsurface and they pass through water, they would create unique signals. “These signals would be diagnostic of current, modern-day water on Mars,” he said in a statement. This is in addition to the existing theories that Mars used to have oceans and that over time it dried up.
Regardless, researchers have more reason to believe that this method could be fruitful on Mars as layers of rock and dust above the groundwater are more likely to be dry without any trace of moisture. Tieyuan Zhu, a geophysicist at Penn State and another of the researchers, said that the surface on Mars naturally removes the noise and exposes useful data that allows the team to characterise several aquifer properties.
