Meteor craters hold clues about life on Mars

Techniques usually used to find oil and gas in the North Sea could help scientists establish whether life could survive on Mars.

A research team including Professor John Parnell from Aberdeen University recently returned from the Arctic, where experts studied a meteor crater using methods normally reserved for detecting oil and gas underground.

The work, at the 23 million-year-old Haughton meteorite impact site in the Canadian High Arctic, is the subject of a Nasa project by the Mars Institute and Nasa Ames Research Centre.

The team concluded the rocks in the crater did not get hot enough to completely wipe out evidence of life which was there when the meteor fell to Earth.

The crater had retained microbes of organic life from millions of years ago.

The surface of Mars is covered with craters caused by crashing meteorites, and the scientists believe the same practices could be employed to look at whether the Red Planet is habitable.

"Working in this remote uninhabited terrain gave us a great opportunity to do detailed sampling where the rocks have not been contaminated by man or covered by vegetation," Professor Parnell said.

"It is widely believed that frequent impact events on the early Earth destroyed organic matter and inhibited evolution," he said.

"However, the Haughton data suggests that in moderate-sized craters, biomolecules, fossilised remains and even microbial life may have survived."

The study's findings are reported in the May edition of Geology, which is published by the Geological Society of America.

- NZPA