Mohammad Afzal Shadab and Eric Hiatt developed a computer model that calculates the time it took for water to move from the Martian surface to deep underground aquifers, a process that likely took 50 to 200 years on early Mars. This is far longer than the days or weeks typically required on Earth, where water tables are much closer to the surface.
Their findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggest that this slow percolation process could have contributed to a massive volume of subsurface water, potentially enough to cover the planet with at least 300 feet of water. This water would have been a significant portion of Mars' total available water supply.
"We want to implement this into [an integrated model] of how the water and land evolved together over millions of years to the present state," said Shadab, the study's lead author and now a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. "That will bring us very close to answering what happened to the water on Mars."
Unlike Earth, where surface water frequently evaporates and returns through rainfall, early Mars likely had a much drier atmosphere. This means that once water infiltrated the ground, it rarely, if ever, resurfaced. According to coauthor Hiatt, this creates a picture of early Mars where any standing water - like lakes or oceans - was likely short-lived.
"The way I think about early Mars is that any surface water you had - any oceans or large standing lakes - were very ephemeral," said Hiatt, who recently completed his doctoral studies at the Jackson School of Geosciences. "Once water got into the ground on Mars, it was as good as gone. That water was never coming back out."
Despite this, the findings offer some optimism for the possibility of past Martian life. Subsurface water might have persisted long enough to support microbial life, and this insight could guide future missions looking for buried water resources to support human exploration.
The research was supported by grants from the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, the Center for Planetary Systems Habitability, and NASA. Other contributors include Rickbir Bahia and Eleni Bohacek from the European Space Agency (now at the UK Space Agency), Vilmos Steinmann from Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary, and Professor Marc Hesse from the Jackson School's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
Research Report:Infiltration Dynamics on Early Mars: Geomorphic, Climatic, and Water Storage Implications
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