Ancient Mars may have had an environment capable of harboring an underground world teeming with microscopic organisms.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.
The findings provide a bleak view of the ways of the cosmos. Life — even simple life like microbes — “might actually commonly cause its own demise," said the study's lead author, Boris Sauterey, now a post-doctoral researcher at Sorbonne University. Early Mars’ presumably moist, warm climate, however, would have been jeopardized by so much hydrogen sucked out of the thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, Sauterey said. As temperatures plunged by nearly minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit , any organisms at or near the surface likely would have buried deeper in an attempt to survive.
Pahlevan led a separate recent study suggesting Mars was born wet with warm oceans lasting millions of years. The atmosphere would have been dense and mostly hydrogen back then, serving as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that eventually was transported to higher altitudes and lost to space, his team concluded.
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Ancient Mars microbes triggered climate change that made it hard for them to surviveTereza is a London-based science and technology journalist, aspiring fiction writer and amateur gymnast. Originally from Prague, the Czech Republic, she spent the first seven years of her career working as a reporter, script-writer and presenter for various TV programmes of the Czech Public Service Television. She later took a career break to pursue further education and added a Master's in Science from the International Space University, France, to her Bachelor's in Journalism and Master's in Cultural Anthropology from Prague's Charles University. She worked as a reporter at the Engineering and Technology magazine, freelanced for a range of publications including Live Science, Space.com, Professional Engineering, Via Satellite and Space News and served as a maternity cover science editor at the European Space Agency.
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