Ancient Mars Had Energy Source for Potential Life Underground

https://www.space.com/41922-mars-life-energy-source-underground.html?utm_source=sdc-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20180925-sdc

Exerpt:

If life got a foothold in the Martian subsurface long ago, it could have tapped into a plentiful chemical energy source, a new study suggests.

That source was hydrogen, generated when radiation split underground water into its constituent parts. And there was probably enough available hydrogen down there to sustain a sizable community of Mars microbes for hundreds of millions of years, starting about 4 billion years ago, according to the study.

“We showed, based on basic physics and chemistry calculations, that the ancient Martian subsurface likely had enough dissolved hydrogen to power a global subsurface biosphere,” study lead author Jesse Tarnas, a graduate student at Brown University in Rhode Island, said in a statement. “Conditions in this habitable zone would have been similar to places on Earth where underground life exists.”