A scientific research study showed that climate change was the reason for the end of the initial life of Mars, and ancient Martian microbes and greenhouse gases destroyed the planet’s atmosphere and made the possibility of life on it doomed to fail.
The study, published in the American scientific journal “Life Science”, said that ancient microbial life on Mars may destroy the planet’s atmosphere through climate change, which eventually led to its extinction.
The new theory comes from studying a climate model that simulates hydrogen-consuming and methane-producing microbes, which lived on Mars regarding 3.7 billion years ago. To thrive and evolve, as they did on Earth, Martian microbes may have doomed themselves once they started, according to the study.
The model suggests that the reason life thrives on Earth and is doomed to failure on Mars is the gaseous formations of two planets, and their relative distances from the Sun. Being so far away from our star from Earth, Mars has been more dependent on a strong haze of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen, to maintain temperatures suitable for life.
So when ancient Mars’ microbes ate hydrogen, a powerful greenhouse gas, and produced methane, an important greenhouse gas on Earth, but less potent than hydrogen, they slowly ate their planet’s heat-trapping blanket, eventually making Mars too cold to be able to anymore. The development of a complex life.
As surface temperatures on Mars dropped from an acceptable range of between 68 and 14 degrees (10 to 20 degrees Celsius) Fahrenheit to minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 57 degrees Celsius), microbes have escaped deeper and deeper into the planet’s warmer crust— burrowing more than 0.6 degrees deep. mile (1 kilometer) just a few hundred million years following the cooling event.
To find evidence for their theory, the researchers want to see if any of these ancient microbes survived. Traces of methane on Mars’ sparse atmosphere have been detected by satellites, as well as in the form of “strange burps” spotted by NASA’s Curiosity rover, which might be evidence that microbes are still present.
Scientists believe that their findings suggest that life may not be instinctively self-sufficient in every favorable environment in which it emerges, and might easily obliterate itself by accidentally destroying the very foundations of its existence.
