Evidence suggests Mars' surface held large bodies of water in the distant past. Water from those seas could have reacted with rocks to form methane that served as an energy source for as-yet-undiscovered life on the red planet, one scientist says.
Ralph White / Getty Images fileIn a discovery that helps solve a longstanding geological mystery and yields new insights into the rise of life on Earth and possibly elsewhere, researchers have found a vast reservoir of methane deep under the ocean floor.locked inside rocks that lie between Earth’s crust
and the underlying mantle layer. Worldwide, the rocks are believed to contain billions of tons of the odorless, colorless gas, which is a key constituent of natural gas as well as a potent greenhouse gas. “We were totally surprised,” Frieder Klein, a marine geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said in a statement. Klein is the lead author of ain the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Methane in Earth’s atmosphere comes from a variety of biological and geological sources — everything from decaying plants in wetlands and the digestive tracts of cattle and other ruminants to coal mining and oil drilling., but scientists have been at a loss to explain the source of this deep-sea methane.
For the research, Klein and two other Woods Hole scientists used a laser-based technique known as Raman spectroscopy to examine thin slices of rocks that had been pushed up to the seafloor from underlying geological layers. The rocks, including many gathered by aA deep-ocean submersible, Alvin can reach a depth of 4,500 meters on dives lasting up to 10 hours.
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