Mercury may have salt glaciers beneath its surface, according to a groundbreaking new study, pointing to the possibility that the planet closest to the Sun may have habitable conditions for some extreme life forms. The independent.
Research on Earth has previously shown that some salt compounds can create habitable niches even in the harshest environments, such as Chile’s arid Atacama Desert.
The new study, recently published in the Planetary Science Journal, hints at the possibility of subterranean regions on Mercury that may be much more hospitable than the surface.
Such salt glaciers are of “critical importance” because they could be signs of volatile compounds such as water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen on other worlds, say scientists including Alexis Rodriguez of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
This finding is “groundbreaking,” according to scientists, as Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, with extremely high daytime temperatures, yet has somehow preserved volatiles for “more than a billion years.”
“Our models strongly confirm that salt flow likely produced these glaciers and that they retained volatiles for more than 1 billion years after their emplacement,” said co-author Bryan Travis.
The Mercurian glaciers were revealed by asteroid impacts that exposed this material beneath the planet’s surface to scientists studying the planet.
“These regions could potentially act as depth-dependent ‘Goldilocks zones’, analogous to the region around a star where the existence of liquid water on a planet could enable life as we know it,” said Dr. Rodríguez.
“But in this case the focus is on the right depth below the planet’s surface rather than the right distance to a star,” he added.
The latest discovery also increases our understanding of the environmental parameters that can sustain life, adding a new dimension to the human search for life in other worlds.
Because Earth also has similar extremely salty areas, researchers have an idea of these types of environments and what life forms – if any – might emerge in these zones.
Researchers suspect that the pits found in some of these craters may have been filled with volatiles before the asteroid impact exposed them to the sun and caused them to sublimate.
However, it remains unclear how these volatiles found a home on Mercury in the first place.
Scientists suspect that they probably came from a hot primordial atmosphere early in Mercury’s formation history.
