火星上的液态水去了哪里?一项新理论提供了新的线索_风闻

【来源龙腾网】

正文原创翻译：

Mars once had water flowing over the surface, but it disappeared billions of years ago. A new study suggests that in addition to being lost to space, much of the water could have been trapped in minerals in the planet’s crust.

火星表面曾经有过水，但数十亿年前就消失了。一项新的研究表明，除了消失在太空之外，大部分水可能被困在这个星球地壳的矿物质中。

Oceans’ worth of ancient water may have been locked up in minerals in Mars’s crust, increasing estimates for the total amount of that once flowed on the red planet.

具有海洋价值的古代水可能被锁在火星地壳的矿物质中，这使得研究人员对曾经在这颗红色星球上流动的水总量的估计增加了。

BY ROBIN GEORGE ANDREWS

作者罗宾·乔治·安德鲁斯

Today, Mars is a frigid desert. But dried up deltas and riverbanks reveal that water once flowed over the plant’s surface. Where did it all go? Scientists have been trying to answer this question for decades, hoping to understand how Mars became an arid wasteland while its neighbor, Earth, kept hold of its water and became a biological paradise.

目前，火星是一个寒冷的沙漠。但这个星球上干涸的三角洲和河岸表明这个星球表面曾有水的痕迹。但是水都到哪里去了呢? 几十年来，科学家们一直试图回答这个问题，希望了解在其邻居地球能保持水源，成为生物天堂的情况下，火星是如何变成贫瘠的荒地的。

Now, by plugging observations of the red planet into new models, a team of geologists and atmospheric scientists has come up with a new picture of Mars’s past: Much of the planet’s ancient water could have been trapped within minerals in the crust, where it remains to this day.

最近，一个由地质学家和大气科学家组成的团队通过将对红色星球的观测数据插入到新的模型中的方法，计算得出了火星过去的新图像: 地球上许多古老的水可能被封存在地壳的矿物质中，而且这些水直到今天仍存在那里。

Prior research suggested that most of Mars’s water escaped into space as its atmosphere was stripped away by the sun’s radiation. But this new study, published today in the journal Science and virtually presented at this year’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, concludes that Mars’s water experienced both an atmospheric exodus and a geologic entrapment.

先前的研究表明，由于火星的大气层被太阳辐射剥离，火星上的大部分水都逃到了太空中。但最近发表在《科学》(Science)杂志上的这项新研究得出结论称，火星上的水实际上经历了大气流失和地质圈藏两种方式。这项研究还在今年的月球和行星科学会议上进行了虚拟展示。

Depending on how much water you start with, the new model estimates that anywhere between 30 and 99 percent of it was incorporated into minerals in the planet’s crust, while the remaining fraction escaped into space. It’s a big range, and both processes likely played a role, so “somewhere in there, the reality lies,” says Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University who wasn’t involved with the new study.

根据最初的水含量多少，新的模型估计，30%到99%的水都融入了地壳的矿物质中，而其余部分则逃逸到了太空中。这是一个很大的范围，而且这两个过程可能都起了作用，所以“现实就存在于其中的某个地方，”普渡大学的行星科学家布里奥妮·霍根说，不过她没有参与这项新研究。

If the new model is accurate, then the story of the planet’s adolescence needs a rewrite. All of the water thought to be trapped in the Martian crust today means that the planet had far more surface water in its youth than previous models had estimated—and that early epoch may have been even more amiable to microbial life than previously thought.

如果新的模型是准确的，那么地球处于青春期的理论就需要推翻重写。现如今所有被认为是被困在火星地壳中的水意味着这个星球在其年轻时期的地表水比以前的模型所估计的要多得多，而且也意味着早期时代的火星可能比以前认为的更适合微生物生命。