From The University of Arizona: “Life may have thrived on early Mars until it drove climate change that caused its demise”
From The University of Arizona
10.11.22
Media contact
Daniel Stolte
Science Writer, University Communications
stolte@arizona.edu
520-626-4402
Researcher contact
Régis Ferrière
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
regisf@arizona.edu
520-626-4741
Early in its history, the red planet likely would have been habitable to methanogens, microbes that make a living in extreme habitats on Earth, according to a study that simulated the conditions on a young Mars.
Researchers in the UArizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology simulated the conditions hypothetical lifeforms would have encountered on Mars 4 billion years ago, when liquid water was likely present in abundance on the red planet. Credit: M. Kornmesser/The European Southern Observatory [La Observatorio Europeo Austral] [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte](EU)(CL)
If there ever was life on Mars – and that’s a huge “if” – conditions during the planet’s infancy most likely would have supported it, according to a study led by University of Arizona researchers.
Dry and extremely cold, with a tenuous atmosphere, today’s Mars is extremely unlikely to sustain any form of life at the surface. But 4 billion years ago, Earth’s smaller, red neighbor may have been much more hospitable, according to the study, which is published in Nature Astronomy [below].
Most Mars experts agree that the planet started out with an atmosphere that was much denser than it is today. Rich in carbon dioxide and hydrogen, it would have likely created a temperate climate that allowed water to flow and, possibly, microbial life to thrive, according to Regis Ferrière, a professor in the UArizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and one of two senior authors on the paper.
The authors are not arguing that life existed on early Mars, but if it did, Ferrière said, “our study shows that underground, early Mars would very likely have been habitable to methanogenic microbes.”
Such microbes, which make a living by converting chemical energy from their environment and releasing methane as a waste product, are known to exist in extreme habitats on Earth, such as hydrothermal vents along fissures in the ocean floor. There, they support entire ecosystems adapted to crushing water pressures, near-freezing temperatures and total darkness.
The research team tested a hypothetical scenario of an emerging Martian ecosystem by using state-of-the-art models of Mars’ crust, atmosphere and climate, coupled with an ecological model of a community of Earthlike microbes metabolizing carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
The study revealed that while ancient Martian life may have initially prospered, it would have rendered the planet’s surface covered in ice and uninhabitable, under the influence of hydrogen consumed from and methane released into the atmosphere. Credit: Boris Sauterey and Regis Ferrière.
On Earth, most hydrogen is tied up in water and not frequently encountered on its own, other than in isolated environments such as hydrothermal vents. Its abundance in the Martian atmosphere, however, could have provided an ample supply of energy for methanogenic microbes about 4 billion years ago, at a time when conditions would have been more conducive to life, the authors suggest. Early Mars would have been very different from what it is today, Ferrière said, trending toward warm and wet rather than cold and dry, thanks to large concentrations of hydrogen and carbon dioxide – both strong greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.
“We think Mars may have been a little cooler than Earth at the time, but not nearly as cold as it is now, with average temperatures hovering most likely above the freezing point of water,” he said. “While current Mars has been described as an ice cube covered in dust, we imagine early Mars as a rocky planet with a porous crust, soaked in liquid water that likely formed lakes and rivers, perhaps even seas or oceans.”
That water would have been extremely salty, he added, according to spectroscopic measurements of rocks exposed on the Martian surface.
To simulate the conditions early lifeforms would have encountered on Mars, the researchers applied models that predict the temperatures at the surface and in the crust for a given atmospheric composition. They then combined those data with an ecosystem model that they developed to predict whether biological populations would have been able to survive in their local environment and how they would have affected it over time.
“Once we had produced our model, we put it to work in the Martian crust – figuratively speaking,” said the paper’s first author, Boris Sauterey, a former postdoctoral fellow in Ferrière’s group who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Sorbonne Université in Paris. “This allowed us to evaluate how plausible a Martian underground biosphere would be. And if such a biosphere existed, how it would have modified the chemistry of the Martian crust, and how these processes in the crust would have affected the chemical composition of the atmosphere.”
“Our goal was to make a model of the Martian crust with its mix of rock and salty water, let gases from the atmosphere diffuse into the ground, and see whether methanogens could live with that,” said Ferrière, who holds a joint appointment at Paris Sciences & Lettres University in Paris. “And the answer is, generally speaking, yes, these microbes could have made a living in the planet’s crust.”
The researchers then set out to answer an intriguing question: If life thrived underground, how deep would one have had to go to find it? The Martian atmosphere would have provided the chemical energy that the organisms would have needed to thrive, Sauterey explained – in this case, hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
“The problem is that even on early Mars, it was still very cold on the surface, so microbes would have had to go deeper into the crust to find habitable temperatures,” he said. “The question is how deep does the biology need to go to find the right compromise between temperature and availability of molecules from the atmosphere they needed to grow? We found that the microbial communities in our models would have been happiest in the upper few hundreds of meters.”
By modifying their model to take into account how processes occurring above and below ground influence each other, they were able to predict the climatic feedback of the change in atmospheric composition caused by the biological activity of these microbes. In a surprising twist, the study revealed that while ancient Martian life may have initially prospered, its chemical feedback to the atmosphere would have kicked off a global cooling of the planet, ultimately rendering its surface uninhabitable and driving life deeper and deeper underground, and possibly to extinction.
“According to our results, Mars’ atmosphere would have been completely changed by biological activity very rapidly, within a few tens or hundreds of thousands of years,” Sauterey said. “By removing hydrogen from the atmosphere, microbes would have dramatically cooled down the planet’s climate.”
Early Mars’ surface would soon have become glacial as a consequence of the biological activity. In other words, climate change driven by Martian life might have contributed to making the planet’s surface uninhabitable very early on.
“The problem these microbes would have then faced is that Mars’ atmosphere basically disappeared, completely thinned, so their energy source would have vanished and they would have had to find an alternate source of energy,” Sauterey said. “In addition to that, the temperature would have dropped significantly, and they would have had to go much deeper into the crust. For the moment, it is very difficult to say how long Mars would have remained habitable.”
Future Mars exploration missions may provide answers, but challenges will remain, according to the authors. For example, while they identified Hellas Planitia, an extensive plain carved out by an impact of a large comet or asteroid very early in the history of Mars, as a particularly promising site to scour for evidence of past life, the location’s topography generates some of Mars’ most violent dust storms, which could make the area too risky to be explored by an autonomous rover.
However, once humans begin to explore Mars, such sites could make it back onto the shortlist for future missions to the planet, Sauterey said. For now, the team focuses its research on modern Mars. NASA’s Curiosity rover and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express satellite have detected elevated levels of methane in the atmosphere, and while such spikes could result from processes other than microbial activity, they do allow for the intriguing possibility that lifeforms such as methanogens may have survived in isolated pockets on Mars, deep underground – oases of alien life in an otherwise hostile world.
Science paper:
Nature Astronomy
See the full article here .
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As of 2019, The University of Arizona enrolled 45,918 students in 19 separate colleges/schools, including The University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson and Phoenix and the James E. Rogers College of Law, and is affiliated with two academic medical centers (Banner – University Medical Center Tucson and Banner – University Medical Center Phoenix). The University of Arizona is one of three universities governed by the Arizona Board of Regents. The university is part of the Association of American Universities and is the only member from Arizona, and also part of the Universities Research Association . The university is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity”.
Known as the Arizona Wildcats (often shortened to “Cats”), The University of Arizona’s intercollegiate athletic teams are members of the Pac-12 Conference of the NCAA. The University of Arizona athletes have won national titles in several sports, most notably men’s basketball, baseball, and softball. The official colors of the university and its athletic teams are cardinal red and navy blue.
After the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, the push for a university in Arizona grew. The Arizona Territory’s “Thieving Thirteenth” Legislature approved The University of Arizona in 1885 and selected the city of Tucson to receive the appropriation to build the university. Tucson hoped to receive the appropriation for the territory’s mental hospital, which carried a $100,000 allocation instead of the $25,000 allotted to the territory’s only university Arizona State University was also chartered in 1885, but it was created as Arizona’s normal school, and not a university). Flooding on the Salt River delayed Tucson’s legislators, and by the time they reached Prescott, back-room deals allocating the most desirable territorial institutions had been made. Tucson was largely disappointed with receiving what was viewed as an inferior prize.
With no parties willing to provide land for the new institution, the citizens of Tucson prepared to return the money to the Territorial Legislature until two gamblers and a saloon keeper decided to donate the land to build the school. Construction of Old Main, the first building on campus, began on October 27, 1887, and classes met for the first time in 1891 with 32 students in Old Main, which is still in use today. Because there were no high schools in Arizona Territory, the university maintained separate preparatory classes for the first 23 years of operation.
Research
The University of Arizona is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. UArizona is the fourth most awarded public university by National Aeronautics and Space Administration for research. The University of Arizona was awarded over $325 million for its Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) to lead NASA’s 2007–08 mission to Mars to explore the Martian Arctic, and $800 million for its OSIRIS-REx mission, the first in U.S. history to sample an asteroid.
National Aeronautics Space Agency OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft.
The LPL’s work in the Cassini spacecraft orbit around Saturn is larger than any other university globally.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration/European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea][Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU)/ASI Italian Space Agency [Agenzia Spaziale Italiana](IT) Cassini Spacecraft.
The University of Arizona laboratory designed and operated the atmospheric radiation investigations and imaging on the probe. The University of Arizona operates the HiRISE camera, a part of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
U Arizona NASA Mars Reconnaisance HiRISE Camera.
NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
While using the HiRISE camera in 2011, University of Arizona alumnus Lujendra Ojha and his team discovered proof of liquid water on the surface of Mars—a discovery confirmed by NASA in 2015. The University of Arizona receives more NASA grants annually than the next nine top NASA/JPL-Caltech-funded universities combined. As of March 2016, The University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is actively involved in ten spacecraft missions: Cassini VIMS; Grail; the HiRISE camera orbiting Mars; the Juno mission orbiting Jupiter; Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO); Maven, which will explore Mars’ upper atmosphere and interactions with the sun; Solar Probe Plus, a historic mission into the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time; Rosetta’s VIRTIS; WISE; and OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. sample-return mission to a near-earth asteroid, which launched on September 8, 2016.
NASA – GRAIL Flying in Formation (Artist’s Concept). Credit: NASA.
National Aeronautics Space Agency Juno at Jupiter.
NASA/Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
NASA Parker Solar Probe Plus named to honor Pioneering Physicist Eugene Parker. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration Wise/NEOWISE Telescope.
The University of Arizona students have been selected as Truman, Rhodes, Goldwater, and Fulbright Scholars. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, UArizona is among the top 25 producers of Fulbright awards in the U.S.
The University of Arizona is a member of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy , a consortium of institutions pursuing research in astronomy. The association operates observatories and telescopes, notably Kitt Peak National Observatory just outside Tucson.
National Science Foundation NOIRLab National Optical Astronomy Observatory Kitt Peak National Observatory on Kitt Peak of the Quinlan Mountains in the Arizona-Sonoran Desert on the Tohono O’odham Nation, 88 kilometers (55 mi) west-southwest of Tucson, Arizona, Altitude 2,096 m (6,877 ft). annotated.
Led by Roger Angel, researchers in the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab at The University of Arizona are working in concert to build the world’s most advanced telescope. Known as the Giant Magellan Telescope (CL), it will produce images 10 times sharper than those from the Earth-orbiting Hubble Telescope.
Giant Magellan Telescope(CL) 21 meters, to be at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s NOIRLab NOAO Las Campanas Observatory(CL), some 115 km (71 mi) north-northeast of La Serena, Chile, over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high.
The telescope is set to be completed in 2021. GMT will ultimately cost $1 billion. Researchers from at least nine institutions are working to secure the funding for the project. The telescope will include seven 18-ton mirrors capable of providing clear images of volcanoes and riverbeds on Mars and mountains on the moon at a rate 40 times faster than the world’s current large telescopes. The mirrors of the Giant Magellan Telescope will be built at The University of Arizona and transported to a permanent mountaintop site in the Chilean Andes where the telescope will be constructed.
Reaching Mars in March 2006, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter contained the HiRISE camera, with Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen as the lead on the project. This National Aeronautics and Space Agency mission to Mars carrying the UArizona-designed camera is capturing the highest-resolution images of the planet ever seen. The journey of the orbiter was 300 million miles. In August 2007, The University of Arizona, under the charge of Scientist Peter Smith, led the Phoenix Mars Mission, the first mission completely controlled by a university. Reaching the planet’s surface in May 2008, the mission’s purpose was to improve knowledge of the Martian Arctic. The Arizona Radio Observatory , a part of The University of Arizona Department of Astronomy Steward Observatory , operates the Submillimeter Telescope on Mount Graham.
U Arizona Steward Observatory at NSF’s NOIRLab NOAO Kitt Peak National Observatory in the Arizona-Sonoran Desert 88 kilometers 55 mi west-southwest of Tucson, Arizona in the Quinlan Mountains of the Tohono O’odham Nation, altitude 2,096 m (6,877 ft).
Kitt Peak National Observatory in the Arizona-Sonoran Desert 88 kilometers 55 mi west-southwest of Tucson, Arizona in the Quinlan Mountains of the Tohono O’odham Nation, altitude 2,096 m (6,877 ft)
The National Science Foundation funded the iPlant Collaborative in 2008 with a $50 million grant. In 2013, iPlant Collaborative received a $50 million renewal grant. Rebranded in late 2015 as “CyVerse”, the collaborative cloud-based data management platform is moving beyond life sciences to provide cloud-computing access across all scientific disciplines.
In June 2011, the university announced it would assume full ownership of the Biosphere 2 scientific research facility in Oracle, Arizona, north of Tucson, effective July 1. Biosphere 2 was constructed by private developers (funded mainly by Texas businessman and philanthropist Ed Bass) with its first closed system experiment commencing in 1991. The university had been the official management partner of the facility for research purposes since 2007.
University of Arizona Landscape Evolution Observatory at Biosphere 2.
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