Sky & Telescope - January 2020 - 38

Life on Mars, Reconsidered

Earth
Oldest
minerals

q GEOLOGICAL TIMELINE When life arose on Earth, Mars also had
seas and lakes. By the time photosynthetic life had taken over and transformed Earth's atmosphere, however, Mars's surface was a wasteland.

Oldest
rocks
Oldest
life
Photosynthesis

Intense impact
bombardments
Anoxygenic

Great
Oxygenation
Event

Oxygenic
Global oceans

Billions of years ago

Mars
Localized ephemeral brine

Hydrothermal
activity

Magnetic field

Global transition

Seas and lakes

Intense impact
bombardments

Some researchers think that life on
Mars might have arisen underground
instead of migrating there, avoiding
the surface altogether.

But on other worlds, could pockets of underground life
have originated independently from the surface?
"It's a question that is very important but we cannot
address yet, whether or not life can originate in a subsurface
environment," Onstott says. "When you think of Europa or
Enceladus or any of the icy satellites and planets that exist
out there that have subsurface oceans but never had a surface
ocean, if life can originate in the subsurface then there's a
chance that life exists there."
Even if humans cannot explore the oceans of Enceladus
yet, there is a place within our reach that has potential for
underground life: Mars.

Next Stop: The Red Planet
Although the Martian surface is currently inhospitable to
life, various lines of evidence indicate that until about 3½
billion years ago, the Red Planet had surface water and an
atmosphere (S&T: July 2018, p. 14). If life had time to appear
on the surface during the billion or so years of clement conditions, then it might have also colonized the Martian underground, where conditions would have remained stable long
after the surface became hostile. These life forms could have
left fossils or other signs of their presence. Some scientists
38

JANUARY 2 02 0 * SK Y & TELESCOPE

even think that this life could persist underground today.
Recent studies suggest that the same geological processes
that provide energy for subsurface microorganisms on
Earth - serpentinization and radiolysis - occurred on Mars.
NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has found an abundance of
the radioactive elements thorium, potassium, and uranium
in the modern Martian crust. In eons past, these elements
could have produced a global habitable subsurface several
kilometers thick, thanks to radiolytically generated hydrogen.
This could have provided enough chemical energy to support
microbes for hundreds of millions of years, as long as there
was enough water to split.
"There is no reason why you couldn't take the same organisms we ﬁnd three kilometers down in South Africa and just
teleport them to the subsurface of Mars, they would do just
ﬁne," says Onstott. "Deep below the surface [life] could be
quite pervasive and quite active."
On the other hand, Mars might not have given life the
chance to evolve on its surface. By current estimates, life
appeared on Earth sometime prior to 3.7 billion years ago,
roughly the same time that Mars's outer core stopped churning and the planet lost its magnetic ﬁeld, exposing its atmosphere to the gusty solar wind. Photosynthetic life appeared on

G REGG DINDER M A N / S&T, SOURCE: J. R.
MICH A LSK I E T A L. / NATUR E GEOSCIENCE 2018

Erosion of
atmosphere

Sky & Telescope - January 2020

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