Strickland reported on December 10 2024 that a mineral trapped within a Martian meteorite that fell to Earth has revealed traces of water on Mars that date back 4.45 billion years, according to new geological research. The zircon grain may contain the oldest direct evidence of ancient hot water on the red planet, which may have provided environments such as hot springs that are associated with life on Earth.
this Martian meteorite weighs approximately 11 ounces (320 grams).
The discovery opens up new ways of understanding whether Mars was ever habitable in its ancient past. It also adds more support to observations already gathered by the fleet of spacecraft orbiting and roaming the red planet, which have spotted evidence of where rivers and lakes once existed on the Martian surface. But key questions remain about when exactly water first appeared on Mars and how it evolved — and disappeared — over time.
Scientists analyzed a sample from the “Black Beauty” meteorite, also known as NWA 7034, that was found in the Sahara Desert in 2011. The meteorite was ejected from the Martian surface after another celestial object hit the planet between 5 million and 10 million years ago, and fragments of it have served as a key source of studying ancient Mars for years.
The new study, published in the journal Science Advances on November 22, focused on a single grain of the mineral zircon spotted within the meteorite. The team’s analysis shows that water was present just 100 million years after the planet formed, which suggests that Mars may have been able to support life at some point in its history.
“Our data suggests the presence of water in the crust of Mars at a comparable time to the earliest evidence for water on Earth’s surface, around 4.4 billion years ago,” said lead study author Jack Gillespie, researcher at the University of Lausanne’s Faculty of Geosciences and Environment in Switzerland, in a statement. “This discovery provides new evidence for understanding the planetary evolution of Mars, the processes that took place on it and its potential to have harboured life.”
Minerals as time capsules
Rocks may hold the answers to some of the biggest remaining questions about Mars, including how much water was present and whether life ever existed on the planet. That’s why meteorites like Black Beauty are of such interest to scientists. Carl Agee, a professor and director of the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico, first presented the space rock to the scientific community in 2013.
“(The Black Beauty meteorite) contains hundreds of rock and mineral fragments, each with a different part of the 4.5 billion years of Martian history,” said study coauthor Dr. Aaron Cavosie, a planetary scientist and senior lecturer the Space Science and Technology Centre at Curtin University, in an email. “(It) is the only source of pieces for the geological puzzle of pre-Noachian Mars.”
The Noachian period occurred from 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago, and little is known from direct measurements dating to the pre-Noachian period on Mars, between 4.5 billion and 4.1 billion years ago, though it’s crucial to understand because it serves as the first page in the Mars history book, Cavosie said. But Black Beauty has revealed some of its secrets. Many of the rock fragments the meteorite contains show that the Martian crust endured a number of impacts, causing a massive amount of upheaval on the planet’s surface, he said.
The space rock also contains the oldest known pieces of Mars, including the oldest zircons, Cavosie said.
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