Space
Underground reservoir on Mars could fill oceans on the planet’s surface by CNN.com
Thanks to NASA's InSight mission, a large amount of water has been discovered inside Mars, buried between 1 and 2 kilometers beneath the surface. This mission landed in 2018 in the Elysium Planitia region and used a seismometer to record over 1,300 marsquakes. By analyzing the speed of seismic waves as they traveled through Mars' internal layers, geophysicists were able to deduce the presence of water-saturated rocks.
The discovery is surprising, as it suggests that Mars could harbor enough water to cover its entire surface.
Mars once had oceans, lakes, and rivers, but most of this water was thought to have escaped into space about 3 billion years ago. However, it now appears that some of this water migrated into Mars' crust, where it became stored in cracks and pores within the rocks.
Unfortunately, this water is difficult to access for human exploration, as it lies at depths of up to 20 kilometers. To put this in perspective, the deepest hole ever drilled on Earth, the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, reached only 12.2 kilometers before drilling was halted due to extreme temperatures.
Although we cannot yet reach this water, its discovery is important for understanding Mars' evolution and opens up the possibility that underground environments could still harbor life.
