A team of researchers have found evidence confirming the presence of a large reservoir of liquid water that could possibly be present under the surface of Mars which was expected back in 2018. There are also three more subsurface saltwater lakes that have been confirmed around the main one.
Scientists believe that these lakes could potentially be serving as habitats for life. They had used data from the radar on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft that investigated the southern polar region of the planet.
Upon observing an area that’s around 75,000 square kilometres in size, they found locations that reflected those signals back in a way that indicates the presence of water trapped underneath a kilometre of ice. The main lake, the one discovered back in 2018, measures 30 kilometres or 19 miles across, while each of the three smaller lakes surrounding it is a few kilometres across.
This comes at a time when some experts are saying that despite the fact that these are promising, there is also a possibility of no lakes to be found on the planet. They believe that even if there are lakes present, they might not necessarily be in the liquid form for the simple fact that it does not have enough heat flow to cause the water to remain in its liquid state. This is because of the absence of life forms on the briny lakes in Antarctica, which is suspected to prevail on Mars as well, due to the similarity in the geographical conditions.