Posted on by Bob King

Mars Loses an Ocean But Gains the Potential for Life

It’s hard to believe it now looking at Mars’ dusty, dessicated landscape that it once possessed a vast ocean. A recent NASA study of the Red Planet using the world’s most powerful infrared telescopes clearly indicate a planet that sustained a body of water larger than the Earth’s Arctic Ocean.

If spread evenly across the Martian globe, it would have covered the entire surface to a depth of about 450 feet (137 meters). More likely, the water pooled into the low-lying plains that cover much of Mars’ northern hemisphere. In some places, it would have been nearly a mile (1.6 km) deep. 

Three of the best infrared observatories in the world were used to study normal to heavy water abundances in Mars atmosphere, especially the polar caps, to create a global map of the planet's water content and infer an ancient ocean. Credit: NASA/ GSFC
Three of the best infrared observatories in the world were used to study normal to heavy water abundances in Mars atmosphere, especially the polar caps, to create a global map of the planet’s water content and infer an ancient ocean. Credit: NASA/ GSFC

Now here’s the good part. Before taking flight molecule-by-molecule into space, waves lapped the desert shores for more than 1.5 billion years – longer than the time life needed to develop on Earth. By implication, life had enough time to get kickstarted on Mars, too.

A hydrogen atom is made up of one proton and one electron, but its heavy form, called deuterium, also contains a neutron. HDO or heavy water is rare compared to normal drinking water, but being heavier, more likely to stick around when the lighter form vaporizes into space. Credit: NASA/GFSC
A hydrogen atom is made up of one proton and one electron, but its heavy form, called deuterium, also contains a neutron. HDO or heavy water is rare compared to normal drinking water, but being heavier, more likely to stick around when the lighter form vaporizes into space. Credit: NASA/GFSC

Using the three most powerful infrared telescopes on Earth – the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the ESO’s Very Large Telescope and NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility – scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center studied water molecules in the Martian atmosphere. The maps they created show the distribution and amount of two types of water – the normal H2O version we use in our coffee and HDO or heavy water, rare on Earth but not so much on Mars as it turns out.

Maps showing the distribution of H20 and HDO across the planet made with the trio of infrared telescopes. Credit: NASA/GSFC
Maps showing the distribution of H20 and HDO (heavy water) across the planet made with the trio of infrared telescopes. Credit: NASA/GSFC

In heavy water, one of the hydrogen atoms contains a neutron in addition to its lone proton, forming an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium. Because deuterium is more massive than regular hydrogen, heavy water really is heavier than normal water just as its name implies. The new “water maps” showed how the ratio of normal to heavy water varied across the planet according to location and season. Remarkably, the new data show the polar caps, where much of Mars’ current-day water is concentrated, are highly enriched in deuterium.

It's thought that
It’s thought that the decay of Mars’ once-global magnetic field, the solar wind stripped away much of the planet’s early, thicker atmosphere, allowing solar UV light to break water molecules apart. Lighter hydrogen exited into space, concentrating the heavier form. Some of the hydrogen may also departed due to the planet’s weak gravity. Credit: NASA/GSFC

On Earth, the ratio of deuterium to normal hydrogen in water is 1 to 3,200, but at the Mars polar caps it’s 1 to 400.  Normal, lighter hydrogen is slowly lost to space once a small planet has lost its protective atmosphere envelope, concentrating the heavier form of hydrogen. Once scientists knew the deuterium to normal hydrogen ratio, they could directly determine how much water Mars must have had when it was young. The answer is A LOT!

Goddard scientists estimate that only 13% of Mars' original water reserves are still around today, concentrated in the icy polar caps. The rest took off for space. Credit: NASA/GSFC
Goddard scientists estimate that only 13% of Mars’ original water reserves are still around today, concentrated in the icy polar caps. The rest took off for space. Credit: NASA/GSFC

Only 13% of the original water remains on the planet, locked up primarily in the polar regions, while 87% of the original ocean has been lost to space. The most likely place for the ocean would have been the northern plains, a vast, low-elevation region ideal for cupping huge quantities of water. Mars would have been a much more earth-like planet back then with a thicker atmosphere, providing the necessary pressure, and warmer climate to sustain the ocean below.

Mars at the present time has little to no liquid water on its cold, desert-like surface. Long ago, the Sun saw its reflection from wave-rippled lakes and a northern ocean. Credit: NASA/GSFC
Mars at the present time has little to no liquid water on its cold, desert-like surface. Long ago, the Sun almost certainly saw its reflection from wave-rippled lakes and a northern ocean. Credit: NASA/GSFC

What’s most exciting about the findings is that Mars would have stayed wet much longer than originally thought. We know from measurements made by the Curiosity Rover that water flowed on the planet for 1.5 billion years after its formation. But the new study shows that the Mars sloshed with the stuff much longer. Given that the first evidence for life on Earth goes back to 3.5 billion years ago – just a billion years after the planet’s formation – Mars may have had time enough for the evolution of life.

So while we might bemoan the loss of so wonderful a thing as an ocean, we’re left with the tantalizing possibility that it was around long enough to give rise to that most precious of the universe’s creations – life.

To quote Charles Darwin: “… from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Illustration showing Mars evolving from a wet world to the present-day Red Planet. Credit: NASA/GSFC
Illustration showing Mars evolving from a wet world to the present-day where liquid water can’t pond on its surface without vaporizing directly into the planet’s thin air. As Mars lost its atmosphere over billions of years, the remaining water, cooled and condensed to form the north and south polar caps. Credit: NASA/GSFC

19 Replies to “Mars Loses an Ocean But Gains the Potential for Life”

  1. I hope Earth doesn’t lose its water. That could be bad – it would mean no more iced tea 🙁

    1. Beckler,
      Or hot tea … my favorite. We should be good for the time being. Our atmosphere and relatively strong gravitational pull keeps things cozy.

  2. Thanks Bob for the article. I love imagining how it must have been then and that comparison picture is a nice one indeed. Knowing that our neighbor had water 1.5 b. years ago is amazing as this truly shows how our universe must be filled with water worlds and maybe, some life too.
    🙂

    1. I appreciate that Tony. I’m with you on the imagining part. I love to roam back to the distant past with my mind’s eye. The more pictures we get of other planets, moons, stars, galaxies, the more real these places (or times) become even if can’t directly experience them.

  3. Wow! what a Great subject from Bob once again and after reading that Mars had water over a mile deep in some geographical areas for more than 1.5 billion years I am sure that life of some kind must have evolved there, even if it was only in bacterial form (life is life) and I believe it is only a matter of time before we prove it without a shadow of a doubt We Are Not Alone and the Cosmos is Teaming with life look up to the Heavens for We Are There 🙂 thanks Bob…

    1. Thanks UFOs! I so much like to think that life’s possible under similar circumstances as what was present on the early Earth. There’s also no doubt that both planets exchanged material during bombardment by meteorites and asteroids especially early on. One way or another, life would seem to have a place on Mars.

  4. Mars “lost” its water to space from solar wind – What generally happened to it? Could much of it have somehow migrated to earth?

    1. Hi caw,
      No, this was a molecule-by-molecule process that began happening as Mars’ atmosphere thinned over billions of years. It continues to this day.

    2. I wouldn’t think so. The solar wind pushes outwards, away from the Sun, so it seems unlikely to me that very much of the stuff it carries away would migrate inwards.

  5. What does/did the ocean water chemistry look like. I don’t recall seeing any reports about it.

  6. This is very interesting. I enjoy imagining other planets of water an life, and dream about them sometimes. The universe is so vast there are likely millions of worlds with evolved lifeforms. As I also believe we have eternal souls which reincarnate I think maybe I’ve already lived on some other planets. Why not?

  7. Good article, good choice of illustrations, good prospect of life in the past… bad news for terraforming. Though 13% of a lot is still a lot, and in the rest there’s lots of deuterium for fusion reactors – once we have them!

  9. Well, i have a feeling we have a good chance to found some form of life on Mars, at least very simple microorganisms, if not on the surface, they may be hiding on the underground, where as i know has a better chance to be habitable than the surface itself.

    But i will tell you, i feel we are so unlucky to lose the old Mars, which had a better atmosphere for habitability, i mean, even now it is so close to have an atmosphere thick enough for even some earth life to evolve there. Same for Venus, if it had an atmosphere as Earth or thinner it could be habitable for some life forms on certain regions.

  10. Mars looses the ocean but gains potential for life… does that mean: with the ocean… no life? 😉
    The headline is missleading.

  12. after the milancovic cycle total solar irradiance variations has certain problems to document the ice ages in Earth, and after my own findings, the Solar Corona disepears and forms in 100k years patern. So Mars possibly gains and losts its atmosphere and oceans on that patern. So when the solar corona shall disapear in some tenths of thousands years, we’ll have an ice age here and mars shall start forming its ocean again.

  13. This haiku didn’t win the Project MAVEN haiku contest but it ought to have won. It was the only one I liked, and it’s the nicest haiku I’ve ever come across.

    I am the petrel
    Exploring ancient shorelines,
    Of long-dry oceans.

    The poet: Earl Frederick in Virginia, USA

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