Possible Recent Underground Volcanism On Mars – New Study

MessageToEagle.com – A new study suggests that must be an underground source of heat for liquid water to exist underneath the Martian polar ice cap, which is one kilometer-and-a-half thick.

“We think that if there is any life, it likely has to be protected in the subsurface from the radiation,”Ali Bramson, a postdoctoral research associate at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona and a co-lead author of the paper, said in a press release.

“If there are still magmatic processes active today, maybe they were more common in the recent past, and could supply more widespread basal melting. This could provide a more favorable environment for liquid water and thus, perhaps, life.”

Mars has two giant ice sheets at its poles, both a couple of kilometers thick. On Earth, it is common for liquid water to be present underneath thick ice sheets, with the planet’s heat causing the ice to melt where it meets the Earth’s crust. A similar phenomenon is on Mars.

Researchers performed physical modeling of Mars to understand how much heat is coming out of the interior of the planet and if there could be enough salt at the base of the ice cap to melt the ice. Salt lowers the melting point of ice significantly so it was thought that salt could have led to melting at the base of the ice cap.

However, salt alone would not raise the temperature high enough to melt the ice.

One plausible heat source would be volcanic activity in the planet’s subsurface and magma from the deep interior of Mars rose towards the planet’s surface about 300,000 years ago, but it did not break the surface. Instead it pooled in a magma chamber below the surface. As the magma chamber cooled, it released heat that melted the ice at the base of the ice sheet. The magma chamber is still providing heat to the ice sheet to generate liquid water today.

The idea of volcanic activity on Mars is not new but most of the volcanic features on Mars are from millions of years ago, leading scientists to believe volcanic activity below and above the planet’s surface stopped long ago.

However, if there was volcanic activity happening hundreds of thousands of years ago, there’s a possibility it could be happening today, researchers say.

Paper

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