A huge network of caves on Mars

This is a discovery that has been made mainly by Chinese researchers. On October 30, Chinese researchers published this extraordinary discovery, a huge network of caves on Mars. The work is funded by Chinese funds and led by planetary geologists from two top-level Chinese universities.

Right now Chinese universities are in the world ranking, the progression that China has had in the last 40 years is amazing, 50 years ago it was one of the poorest countries in the world, literally and it is not that it is the richest country in the world because it is still the United States, but statistically I think it even has the same number of millionaires, and the universities have also had a tremendous evolution.

If we go to Mars, we will have to start from the beginning, as in the past, living in caves, because, some things can or necessarily must be on the surface with exterior structures, but for a colony, it is a place where the family is, not scientists or miners who are there doing a job and then return home to Earth, a colony is people whose house, whose home will be in this case Mars.

And if we want to colonize Mars with the initial risks that it will have due to radiation, due to the climate, due to a multitude of things, the best place to be protected, create crops, live, have families and our industries and our activities will be these caves.

In research, the water that you see in the graphics or in the illustration is serious, they are karst caves, they are also potentially accessible caves, they were created by water in the Hebrus Valleys, on Mars, karst caves are those that are formed by water currents as they dilute the limestone rock, they are caves like the ones we can find in the peaks of Europe, the cave of of Cobadonga in Asturias, Spain, or the cenotes of the Yucatan Peninsula are examples of structures carved by water in large limestone landscapes.

And in this region of Mars we have a huge limestone area and in the past there was a lot of water, these caves are proof of this and are interesting because until now the caves that were known were made of volcanic lava tubes, these are the first that are directly and clearly attributed to processes that imply the presence of water and in addition, they are accessible, they could be explored in the future, since at least eight holes or skylights have been found on the surface that are entrances or underground cavities.

Some of these cavities take you dozens and some even hundreds of meters deep, they have vertical walls, but there are some cases, apparently according to the researchers, whose entrance could be quite gentle, that is, you would not have to fall by ropes, you could go down with a vehicle, so they could serve as natural shelters for human bases and right now they are priority objectives for astrobiology missions.

In these places, if there was life on Mars, in those Martian seas and rivers from billions of years ago, the water lasted much longer there and in addition, it is the part directly related to the surface, there are deep underground aquifers on Mars, but those underground aquifers that have been found are about 10 km deep, life forms may have arrived there, yes, but obviously it is easier for them to have reached those caves at the time, because it is water that fell from the rivers or rain directly and filtered into these caves or areas that were covered by a lake by a sea, in these cases it is believed that everything was due to the effect of rivers.

And inside those caves it is believed that the water could have been maintained when everything outside was already a cold desert for hundreds of millions of years, this implies that in these areas of underground water, which they call the underground ocean or deep aquifers of Mars, the water, the presence of water could last between 500 to 1000 million years longer than it lasted on the surface and in terms of habitability it extends the possibility of life on Mars much longer, which is why it is an objective right now of any astrobiology mission. to search for life on Mars.

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