Huge amounts of water found in lower layers of Martian crust

By Alimat Aliyeva

American planetary scientists have found evidence in seismic data from the Insight landing platform that there is a huge amount of water in the lower layers of the Martian crust, Azernews reports.

According to the information, the volume of water would be enough to completely fill all the seas and oceans of ancient Mars.
"Similar environments on Earth, including deep mines and the bottom of the world's oceans, are definitely habitable. So far we have not discovered Martian life, but now we know about the existence of an environment where it could exist in principle," said Michael Manga, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Over the past two decades, planetary scientists have discovered a lot of evidence that rivers, lakes and entire oceans of fresh water existed on the surface of Mars in ancient times. According to scientists, they contained about the same amount of water as in the earth's Arctic Ocean. Where this water disappeared and when it appeared on the surface of the fourth planet of the Solar system, scientists cannot yet say for sure.

A significant part of this water could not evaporate into space, as many researchers believed in the past, but go to a great depth into large pores inside the Martian crust, located at a distance of 11-20 km from the surface of Mars. Scientists came to this conclusion by analyzing seismic data collected by the InSight platform in 2018-2022 during observations of marsquakes and asteroid impacts.