Alien life might have flourished in ‘vacation-style beaches’ on Mars, scientists say

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox

Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter

Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

Mars was once home not only to an ocean but "vacation-style" beaches with sun, sand and softly lapping waves, new findings suggest.

Researchers now believe that the planet was covered in a huge ocean to its north – as well as a more habitable environment for life.

“We’re finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas,” said Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geology at Penn State and co-author on the new study. “We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand — a proper, vacation-style beach.”

That is thanks to data taken from the Zhurong Mars rover, which was sent to the red planet by China and landed in 2021.

That rover carried a radar that was able to explore the area underneath the surface of Mars. Using low- and high-frequency radar, it could see buried rock formations.

Researchers have used that data to find hidden layers of rock under the surface of Mars that suggest it once had an ocean. The radar data showed a similar layered structure to that found on beaches on Earth, where there are deposits that slope towards the ocean and are made when sediments are carried by waves into a body of water.

“This stood out to us immediately because it suggests there were waves, which means there was a dynamic interface of air and water,” Cardenas said. “When we look back at where the earliest life on Earth developed, it was in the interaction between oceans and land, so this is painting a picture of ancient habitable environments, capable of harboring conditions friendly toward microbial life.”

The work suggests that Mars was generally once much wetter than it is today. Researchers believe that as well as its large ocean it was generally warm and wet for maybe tens of millions of years, during which it may have supported alien life.

“The capabilities of the Zhurong rover have allowed us to understand the geologic history of the planet in an entirely new way,” said Michael Manga, professor of Earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a corresponding author on the paper.

“Its ground-penetrating radar gives us a view of the subsurface of the planet, which allows us to do geology that we could have never done before. All these incredible advancements in technology have made it possible to do basic science that is revealing a trove of new information about Mars.”