Ancient Mars might have been teeming with life under its surface, scientists announced Monday.
The life would have been microscopic organisms that greatly affected the Martian atmosphere, according to the French researchers.
Their effect might have caused a Martian ice age, which caused the extinction of the simple organisms, according to a report.
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Life forms, even simple ones like microbes, “might actually commonly cause its own demise,” Boris Sauterey, the study’s lead author and a post-doctoral researcher at Sorbonne University, said.
The findings “are a bit gloomy, but I think they are also very stimulating,” Sauterey said.
“They challenge us to rethink the way a biosphere and its planet interact.”
Sauterey’s team utilized terrain and climate models to simulate and evaluate the Martian world roughly 4 billion years ago.
It was at this time the planet was believed to have been flush with water and hospitable, the report noted.
The researchers posited that hydrogen-consuming, methane-making microbes could have lived just below the dirt on the red planet.
This habitat would have seen them protected from harmful radiation.
The massive consumption of hydrogen from the microscopic organisms might have severely damaged the atmosphere and plunged Mars into an ice age.
With an image of the past in mind, Sauterey said he is looking to see what life under Mars’s surface could look like today.
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“Could Mars still be inhabited today by micro-organisms descending from this primitive biosphere?” he said. “If so, where?”
