14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists in Arizona, US, and in the Netherlands suspect that the Red Planet might be home to microorganisms that have been lying dormant in this part of the Universe for ages.
What's more, they argue that, given the right circumstances and environmental conditions, these microorganisms might pull a Lazarus and come back from the dead.
According to Daily Mail, the brainiacs behind this theory base their claims on evidence that they say stands as proof that, millions of years ago, Mars experienced a great flood.
This evidence boils down to the presence on the Red Planet's surface of both a crater dubbed Aram Chaos and of a channel measuring 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in width and 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) in depth, that leads away from it.
The Arizona and the Netherlands scientists believe that, when Mars was a bit younger than it currently is, and bartenders probably still asked for its ID, the Aram Chaos crater was home to a humongous lake.
As the Red Planet got older and cooler, this lake froze, and an insulating layer of sediment came to form on top of it. However, thanks to geothermal energy originating from Mars' entrails, the Martin crater eventually found itself accommodating for a liquid layer.
In time, the sediment layer atop the supposedly frozen lake became weak and collapsed. When this happened, the ice also broke down, and the water trapped inside the planet spilled all over the Red Planet's surface.
If it indeed happened that the Aram Chaos crater on the Red Planet released water at some point in its history, there is little doubt that the sight of this process would have been nothing short of impressive.
This is because, according to recent estimates, the size of the channel accompanying said crater indicates that a whopping 320,000 cubic feet (90,000 cubic kilometers) would have had to travel along this path within just one month in order to form it.
Since certain microbes have been shown to be able to survive in extreme conditions, scientists say that, all things considered, it might be possible that the ice- and sediment-covered lake inside the Aram Chaos crater accommodated for some life forms before it spilled.
When the water left said geological formation, it must have taken these microorganisms with them, scattering them all over the Red Planet's surface. This means that, with some luck, it could be that dormant microbes are now hiding in Mars' ice, just waiting to be discovered.
“Microbes could be waiting for us to drill a hole and sample ice and bring them back to life,” researcher Victor Baker with the University of Arizona in Tucson, US, told the press in a recent interview.