Talk:Possible present day habitats for life on Mars (Including potential Mars special regions)
Modern Mars Habitability/Old revision from Wikipedia with extra quotes
Need to add https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160920103618.htm
A new study shows that rocks formed by the grinding together of other rocks during earthquakes are rich in trapped hydrogen -- a finding that suggests similar seismic activity on Mars may produce enough hydrogen to support life.
Needs update from my Touch Mars? book[edit | hide | hide all]
I have some of the same material in my book here
Ok to Touch?
It's more up to date, worked on it some more since this article. So some of it should be merged back.
E.g.
And
As far as licensing is concerned I see no reason why I can't re-license my material as CC by SA when it is merged back in here.
So anyway, the deep hydrosphere would be around 6 kilometers below the surface, kept liquid by geothermal heat. However, it's easier for water to stay liquid if it's already melted than it is for it to melt in the first place. If the water metls first, then according to a couple of studies, it stays liquid indefinitely below only 100 meters of gravel in Martian conditions from the internal heat of Mars. Ice is less insulating than gravel, but it can stay liquid indefinitely below 600 meters of ice. Without any geothermal hot spots, just the internal heat of the planet itself.
With that background that new discovery of a lake at a depth of 1.5 km wasn't that surprising, if it somehow got melted at some point in the past even if it was just ordinary water, it should remain liquid. They'd been looking for them for some time because of that calculation.
Seems it is probably laced with salts and very cold because the radar imaging of the ice showed ice that seemed to be much colder than 0 C as otherwise it wouold be more optically opaque to the radar.