Sponges on Mars? We ask Stamenković about their oxygen-rich briny seeps model: Difference between revisions
Sponges on Mars? We ask Stamenković about their oxygen-rich briny seeps model (edit)
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(Created page with "Vlada Stamenković of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and colleagues have developed a chemical model of how oxygen dissolves in salty brines in the cold Mars|Mar...") |
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The Mars atmosphere has a pressure of only 0.6% of Earth's atmosphere, on average. Also it's mainly carbon dioxide; only 0.146% of that thin atmosphere is oxygen. Yet the result of their modeling was clear. In the cold conditions on Mars these minute amounts of oxygen can get into the salty seeps of water which may be present there. What's more,there's enough oxygen in the brines anywhere on Mars to support microbes that depend on oxygen (aerobes). There's a caveat here; they don't know how long it would take to reach those levels but once it reaches equilibrium with the atmosphere then that's how much oxygen there should be in the brines.
Oxygen permits a more energy intensive metabolism, and many microbes and almost all complex multicellular life on Earth depend on oxygen. They found that cold water would take up much more oxygen than warm water. In the coldest salty water in the polar regions
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