War of the Geeks

It's not something to take too seriously - the list of previous possibilities that didn't pan out is quite long - but two recent reports have raised the possibility that there could possibly, just maybe, be life on Mars. Not in the past, now.

A frozen sea, surviving as blocks of pack ice, may lie just beneath the surface of Mars, suggest observations from Europe's Mars Express spacecraft. The sea is just 5° north of the Martian equator and would be the first discovery of a large body of water beyond the planet's polar ice caps,

reports New Scientist magazine.

There already was "compelling" evidence for past flooding in the area, now it appears that a sea of ice 800-900 kilometers (500-560 miles) wide and 45 meters (150 feet) deep may be hidden under a few centimeters (an inch or two) of volcanic ash, which has protected it from sublimating into the thin Martian atmosphere.

"If the reported hypothesis is true, then this would be a prime candidate landing site to search for possible extant life on Mars," says Brian Hynek, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, US.

There are, not surprisingly, uncertainties here: Other somewhat similar areas have been chalked up to solidified lava. But the "plates" making up this area are larger and smoother, with straighter boundaries, than any such lava plates found on Earth. They look much more - both in shape and size - like pack ice in the Antarctic.

One idea that occurs to me is that if this is in fact an ocean of blocks of ice water, any seismic activity could cause enough friction to keep some of the water between the plates liquid or at least gelid. And that could make for some interesting possibilities.

Someone else is pursuing such an interesting possibility from another angle, again reported in New Scientist.

A leading European Space Agency scientist[, Vittorio Formisano of the Institute of Physics and Interplanetary Science in Rome,] says he has found a gas in the Martian atmosphere that he believes can only be explained by the presence of life.

Formisano used data from ESA's Mars Express satellite orbiting Mars to conclude that the concentration of formaldehyde in the Martian atmosphere is about 130 parts per billion. If that is being produced by the oxidation of methane, it would need, he estimates, about 2.5 million tons of methane per year to produce it. Methane is produced in abundance by life processes among bacteria - and there is no known non-organic source on Mars that could produce near that amount.

"I believe that until it is demonstrated that non-biological processes can produce this, possibly the only way to produce so much methane is life," he says. "My conclusion is there must be life in the soil of Mars."

Other scientists are understandably cautious, not only because of the history of previous such declarations, but also because to get his results Formisano pushed the capabilities of the measuring instruments to their limits. What's more, others say, even if he's right about the formaldehyde, there may be as yet unknown sources of methane on Mars other than organic ones. Formisano admits he can't prove his contention. Even so, he says, the hints he has obtained for life on Mars are the best we can get now. "The next step is to go there and look for it."

Missions now in the planning stage will do just that. : sigh : This is so much of a better way to spend money than on invasions.