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Researchers in Italy have discovered a lake of liquid water on Mars. It is 20km across and buried 1.5km beneath the planet’s surface, close to its southern polar ice cap. The lake seems to be a Martian cousin of familiar Earthly features such as Lake Vostok, a subterranean lake in Antarctica. The biggest question now is whether there is life on the planet.

Roberto Orosei at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Bologna led the research team who drew the groundbreaking conclusions, and the paper detailing their work was today published in the journal Science. The team leveraged data from the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding, or MARSIS, which is located on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter. The scientists examined data between 2012 and 2015 in the area near the planet’s south pole. While this region “does not exhibit any peculiar characteristics,” as the paper notes, it has long been thought that the polar ice caps may contain liquid deposits.

And now, this hypothesis has been proven correct.

“It’s probably not a very large lake,” Orosei told the BBC. While it’s unclear how deep the lake is, the team estimates a minimum of three feet. “This really qualifies this as a body of water. A lake, not some kind of meltwater filling some space between rock and ice, as happens in certain glaciers on Earth,” Orosei added.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/water-on-mars-lake/

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2018/07/24/science.aar7268.full