A giant volcano - once covered in glacial ice and nearly twice as tall as Mount Everest - has been discovered on Mars by geologists in a major breakthrough, prompting speculation that the planet may have harbored life.
Arsia Mons, the third tallest volcano on Mars and one of the largest mountains in the solar system, may be home to one of the most recent habitable environments yet found on the Red Planet, Indo-Asian News Service reported.
"If signs of past life are ever found at older sites, then Arsia Mons would be the next place I would want to go," Kat Scanlon, a graduate student at Rhode Island-based Brown University said.
Scanlon found pillow lava formations, similar to those that form on earth when lava erupts at the bottom of an ocean, by utilizing data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Kinds of ridges and mounds that form on earth when a lava flow is constrained by glacial ice were also discovered, Scanlon said.
"This new analysis of the landforms surrounding Arsia Mons shows that eruptions along the volcano's northwest flank happened at the same time that a glacier covered the region around 210 million years ago," according to IANS. "The heat from those eruptions would have melted massive amounts of ice to form englacial lakes - bodies of water that form within glaciers like liquid bubbles in a half-frozen ice cube."
"The ice-covered lakes of Arsia Mons would have held hundreds of cubic kilometers of meltwater," Scanlon noted.
Despite the frigid conditions of Mars, that much ice-covered water would have remained liquid for a substantial period of time.
A possibility of some of that glacial ice being there remains, IANS reported.
"The fact that the Arsia Mons site is relatively young makes it an interesting target for possible future exploration," scientists noted in a paper published in the journal Icarus.
