Researchers revealed in a study about the possibility of housing on Mars More than 3.7 billion years ago, the Red Planet may have once been home to microbes that feed on hydrogen and produce methane, just like early Earth, and previous evidence suggested that Mars once had favorable conditions for the development of life.
According to the British newspaper, “Daily Mail”, a team of international researchers analyzed the interaction between the early environment on Mars and an ecosystem of microorganisms called methanogenic hydrogen, which eats hydrogen and produces methane.
These microorganisms are among the oldest forms of life on our planet, and study simulations predict that the Martian crust was a habitable place for this ecosystem, provided the surface was not entirely covered in ice, and could have produced biomass similar to that of Earth’s early ocean.
The actions of these microbes would have triggered reactions with the climate on Mars, cooling it globally by up to more than 446 degrees Fahrenheit (230 degrees Celsius) and creating less habitable conditions near the surface, researchers led by the University of Arizona said.
This would force the microbes to move gradually within the planet’s crust, they added. Looking ahead, the authors identified three sites – Hellas Planitia, Isidis Planitia and Jezero Crater – as the best places to look for signs of this early methane life near the surface of Mars.
“The spatial projections of our projections point to low-to-mid-latitude lowland sites as good candidates for detecting traces of this early life at or near the surface,” the researchers wrote.