The apparently barren lifeless planet that is Mars nowadays might have harbored microscopic life at some point in the distant past, researchers from France postulate.
However, if they did exist, they were likely responsible for Mars turning into the desolate wasteland, with the study’s lead author Boris Sauterey, a post-doctoral researcher at Sorbonne University, saying that life “might actually commonly cause its own demise”, according to AP.
During the course of their research, Sauterey and his team sought to use climate and terrain models to evaluate Mars’ habitability about 4 billion years in the past when it supposedly had water.
The researchers concluded that, just like on early Earth, microbes that fed on hydrogen and produced methane likely thrived in the upper layer of the Martian soil.
However, the supposedly warm and moist climate of the early Mars would have been jeopardized by these very microorganisms, as them sucking hydrogen out of the planet’s thin atmosphere would have plunged the planet into an ice age, with temperatures dropping by nearly minus 200 degrees Celsius.
Noting that their findings may appear “a bit gloomy”, Sauterey said he believes they are also “very stimulating”.
“They challenge us to rethink the way a biosphere and its planet interact,” he said in an email cited by AP.