[LINK] "Ancient Martian lakes may have harboured life, researchers say"

[rfmcdonald]

CBC reports on some suggestions that ancient Martian basins might have housed lakes perhaps as hospitable as ones on the Tibetan Highlands right now.

Deep water basins formed on Mars more than three billion years ago may have once been habitable, according to a new research paper which its authors say lends credibility to the theory that there was once life on the Red Planet.

Scientists from the Planetary Science Institute in Tuscon, Ariz., have been studying a region of Mars close to a massive volcanic plateau, and theorize it may have once been a habitable environment.

Groundwater circulation beneath the surface of this site may have helped to create some of the planet's deepest basins, wrote scientists J. Alexis Palmero Rodriguez, Cathy Weitz and Thomas Plaz in a paper published in the journal Planetary Space and Science.

The researchers suggest the basins may have been alternately covered with lava and water over the course of hundreds of millions of years, creating the right balance of temperature ranges, water pressure and nutrients necessary to sustain life.

Shallow lakes may have formed in these lava-covered basins within the last few tens of millions of years, they say.

"The temperature ranges, presence of liquid water, and nutrient availability, which characterize known habitable environments on Earth, have higher chances of forming on Mars in areas of long-lived water and volcanic processes," Rodriguez said in a news release.