Methane Survey Reveals Mars Is Far From 'Dead'

astroengine writes "The first planet-wide studies of methane on Mars — incorporating billions of measurements made by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft — shows gas concentrations peak in autumn and plummet in winter. Scientists have found significantly higher methane concentrations in the Tharsis, Elysium and Arabia Terrae regions. Tharsis and Elysium are home to Mars' most massive volcanoes and Arabia Terrae has large quantities of subterranean frozen water. This indicates the gas could be generated by geological or biological activity. 'It could be geology or biology, but it is not coming from another source. There is a seasonal pattern, so it could only be a local origin,' Sergio Fonti, with Italy's Universita del Salento, told Discovery News."

Comments

Good news

[2names]

I'm glad they found this type of cyclic activity. The sooner we find complex life off-Earth the better.

Re:Good news

[X0563511]

That post was bad, and you should feel bad!

Re:Good news

[saider]

It would be another step back from the "we-are-the-sole-reason-for-the-universe's-existence" mindset. Reducing humanities self-centered leanings leaves some more room for a "we-are-a-part-of-the-universe" attitude that tends to promote a more responsible approach to resource management.

Re:Good news

[Tumbleweed]

It would be another step back from the "we-are-the-sole-reason-for-the-universe's-existence" mindset. Reducing humanities self-centered leanings leaves some more room for a "we-are-a-part-of-the-universe" attitude that tends to promote a more responsible approach to resource management.

I don't think that would have the impact your hoping for unless it was intelligent life that was more technologically advanced than us. Anything less would be treated just like Western civilization treated (and continues to treat) less advanced societies and life forms. "God made the universe for white guys who claim to be Christian," etc.

Re:Good news

[Schemat1c]

It's not obvious to me why it's good for us to find complex off-Earth life. Unless it's a technology advanced species that can help us with our problems, I don't see any benefit to finding complex off-Earth life at all. What am I missing?

Hmm, here are a few reasons: The Vatican, Jerusalem, Mecca, the southern half of the United States, etc.

Re:Good news

[severoon]

From TFA: "'It could be geology or biology, but it is not coming from another source. There is a seasonal pattern, so it could only be a local origin,' Sergio Fonti, with Italy's Universita del Salento, told Discovery News."

To paraphrase: "It is geology."

OH COME ON

[iONiUM]

Don't get me wrong, I like hearing about space updates. But it feels like there's been a ton of "there may be signs that may indicate signs of biological life from stuff we may or may not have overlooked before. Also? It might not be caused by a biological thing."

I want a "we found fucking life" article. Stop teasing me with this nonsense.

Re:OH COME ON

[MightyMartian]

I think the unspoken belief in the scientific community is that it's pointing very heavily towards life on Mars, but the rule of thumb in science is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", and claims don't get much more extraordinary than the claim that life has been found on another world. Necessity and prudence require that the experts couch their language and manage expectations until we can gather that extraordinary evidence. Since there are other ways that the methane could be formed, in particular geological activity (which in its own way is pretty extraordinary considering Mars' lack of a magnetic field has long been seen as a sign that it is a geologically dead world, lacking a molten or semi-molten core), until incontrovertible evidence has been gathered there will always be the need to list alternative explanations, no matter how much they piss on the parade.

Quite frankly we're not going to know until we find some Martian life, and that's going to take a good deal of time. We're decades away from being able to gather direct evidence, unless we get very lucky.

Re:OH COME ON

[arth1]

I think it's pretty certain that there is life on Mars now, as NASA didn't take any extraordinary measures to eradicate all possible forms of life from the probes until 1995 and the Mars Orbiter. Earlier, a memo was issued, but not much was done. Up to 10^5 possibly surviving microbes were permissible on the earlier crafts, if I remember correctly.

It's a shame, as the planet can never be uncontaminated and studied as a truly lifeless planet.

Re:OH COME ON

[MightyMartian]

If life is responsible for the seasonal methane fluctuations, I doubt very much that it could be explained by anything hitching a ride on our spacecraft.

Re:OH COME ON

[justthisdude]

Of course the episodic bursts of methane came form the global surveyor that surveyed the planet: as every middle schooler knows, "whoever smelt it dealt it".

Re:OH COME ON

[MightyMartian]

You start by not defining living systems as any specific type of chemistry, but rather certain activities; ie. metabolism, reproduction/replication, respiration, excretion. While the only systems we know of that do that from observation is carbon-based life on Earth, we can conceive of alternatives, whether simply using other forms of carbon chemistry, or even possible silicon-based life.

The risk, of course, of very generalized definitions is that you could catch chemical activity that isn't life, but I think the above tests would be close enough to be highly suggestive that the chemical interactions you're seeing are biotic in nature, regardless of the precise form the chemistry itself takes. I think we're sufficiently good enough of recognizing this things to not confuse even simply living systems with more mundane chemical processes like crystallization, oxidization, etc.

Re:OH COME ON

[Smidge204]

What kind of badass microbial life have you been dreaming up that ignores extreme heat, extreme cold, doesn't breathe anything, survives in a vacuum, and doesn't eat? ;p

Ignoring the factual errors in your description... Tardigrades seem to fit those requirements quite nicely:

- Survive temperatures from -273C to +151C

- Survive decades without water

- Survive radiation doses thousands of times higher than what would kill other organisms

- Survive when exposed to the vacuum of space
=Smidge=

Re:OH COME ON

[izomiac]

I also don't think it's likely, but it's easily possible. Some bacteria have a doubling time less than 30 minutes, so if they found a suitable environment without competition they'd reproduce at nearly their maximal rate for quite some time.

OTOH, the whole natural selection thing comes into play since otherwise, in 15 years, they'd weight a lot more than Mars itself. I'd give a number, but didn't have a calculator handy that could handle 2^(15*365.25*24*2), which is how many descendants a single bacteria on the last non-sterile probe could now have if resources were infinite.

Furthermore, it only took ~2,000 years to oxygenate Earth. Mars has ~1/200th of the atmosphere that Earth does, so, theoretically, in 10 years bacteria could completely alter the atmosphere of Mars. Plus that's just from the slight imbalance between energy production by photosynthesis and energy use by oxidative respiration. An actual waste product could accumulate much more quickly.

In other news...

[gearsmithy]

Martians label Earth "stupidest planet ever" for measuring their farts billions of times...

Just in Time!

[davevr]

Someone call Mazlan Othman asap!

Nice way to narrow it down.

[IndustrialComplex]

FTFA: 'It could be geology or biology, but it is not coming from another source.'

Another source like what? Comets hitting the planet? Isn't geology pretty freaking broad for a category?

That's like looking at a rock on the Earth and saying "Well, we are pretty sure that it either formed here on earth, or it is a meteorite."

Re:Nice way to narrow it down.

[ceejayoz]

Both are big deals - Mars isn't believed to be geologically active, and life would be a massively interesting find for obvious reasons.

The seasonality rules out explanations like cosmic rays generating methane.

Re:Nice way to narrow it down.

[IndustrialComplex]

Both are big deals - Mars isn't believed to be geologically active, and life would be a massively interesting find for obvious reasons.
The seasonality rules out explanations like cosmic rays generating methane.

That's a fair response. I just thought it was fairly broad since I subconsciously eliminated the cosmic ray option since they did mention seasonality.

Ignoring the biological aspect for a moment. Geological just seems so damned broad as to incorporate pretty much everything on a planet. If it were a Jovian moon, I'd consider it less broad of a suggestion since you would then be eliminating seasonal influences from Jupiter in stating that it was just geological.

Re:Nice way to narrow it down.

[Shadowlore]

Another source would include the possibility of freeze/thaw cycles. There is also another method suggested last year involving radiolytic H2reacting in a non-bioligic manner with CO2 dissolved in water. That process would be neither biological nor geological. There are other atmospheric/radiological possibilities too (such as UV interacting with the atmosphere).

Yet another method is one you throw out sarcastically. Last year, as I recall, there was a hypothesis put forth that meteorites released methane as they burn up on entry. They do, in fact. However, the problem with that hypothesis is that this source is not significant enough to account for the large volumes of Methane required to support the cycles shown in the data this report discusses (10kg/year compared to a couple hundred tons/year). Subsurface deposits melting were also proposed as a source.

So yes, that actually does narrow it down. It narrows it down very significantly, and further if you accept the hypothesis that Mars is a 'dead' planet geologically. "Geological processes" are not as broad as you seem to believe. Geology is a rather specific field. Mars is considered dead geologically. Thus, if you accept that all other sources of Methane have been eliminated you are left with the following two possibilities:
1) Biological - life of some sort
2) Mars isn't geologically dead, and it is a geological process.

Either result is pretty damned important. Though technically it could be a third option: Both.

Further, the bigger quandary isn't so much *how* it is produced, but why does the Martian air "lose" so much methane so quickly? It is removed from the atmosphere faster than the usual suspects.

Your analogy would work if rocks could be formed atmospherically, biologically, or radiologically.

Re:Time to mine it!

[canajin56]

We have tons of methane mined daily right on Earth. We burn it off at the source because we can't be arsed to pipe it anywhere. If you can't even be bothered piping it from an oil rig, why would you fly it through interplanetary space? I know, bad form, serious reply to non-serious post ;)

Biological vs Geological

[PPH]

Actually, 'biological' should be 'current biological'.

Grab a sample of Martian methane and check its distribution of carbon isotopes. Carbon sequestered thousands or millions of years ago should have different ratios from atmospheric sources (the principle of carbon dating). Current biological activity should reflect the ratios of the existing carbon sources.

Of course, if underground life is munching on 'old' carbon, its farts will look old as well. Just as old as CH4 sequestered a long time ago and leaking to the surface only now.

Seasonal meteorite showers, anyone?

[kiwix]

The seasonality doesn't really rule out an external source. On Earth we have seasonal meteorite showers, I guess they could have the same on Mars.

Re:Question?

[jd]

Maybe. Let's say it resembles a bacterium on Earth except for the fact that the one on Mars has organelles or other internal structural features that take a very long time to develop that are absent from the one on Earth (or vice versa). You can then say with some certainty that it wasn't contamination during the Space Age. If further samples indicated that the variation in DNA was so great that the most recent common ancestor to all of them was a few million years ago at the earliest, it's old enough to call it Martian life regardless of the ultimate source of organic matter.