By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--July 25, 2018
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For the first time, scientists have detected a lake of salty water under the Martian ice, a study released Wednesday said. The lake is about a mile under the surface and stretches 12 miles across, they say. The presence of liquid water under the Martian polar ice caps has long been suspected but not seen, until now, the study said. The discovery raises the possibility of finding life on the red planet. “Without water, no form of life as we know it could exist,” said Anja Diez of the Norwegian Polar Institute. Astronomers used radar data from the orbiting European spacecraft “Mars Express” to find the water. They spent at least two years checking over the data to make sure they’d detected water, not ice or another substance.I’m going to give these scientists the benefit of the doubt that this really is water based on their methods of checking it. It’s not the same thing as the spacecraft sending back photos of a lake, of course, but it’s entirely plausible that there could be underground water. It’s strange, though, if there water is contained entirely under the surface and at no point does it rise in the form of a river, lake or pond. Water on Earth is contained in river basins that eventually rises to the surface and flows into larger bodies of water. Every planet is different, I suppose, but what is it about Mars that keeps the water under the surface all the time, if indeed that is how it works.
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