NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has reported “evidence of a carbon cycle on ancient Mars,” according to a recent press release. These new findings could help researchers better understand if and how Mars ever supported life.

As Curiosity continues to traverse the Gale Crater, researchers are working to better understand the Red Planet’s habitability and climate transitions that lead to the environment it has today. The findings have been published in the journal Science. 

Curiosity’s Latest Discovery 

Working with the NASA Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover team, Ben Tutolo, Ph.D., an associate professor with the Department of Earth, Energy and Environment in the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary, and the team analyzed data from three of Curiosity’s drill sites. 

From this data, the research team noted the presence of siderite, “an iron carbonate material, within sulfate-rich layers of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater,” according to the press release. 

“The discovery of large carbon deposits in Gale Crater represents both a surprising and important breakthrough in our understanding of the geologic and atmospheric evolution of Mars,” said Tutolo in the press release.

Reaching this point has been a long-term goal for the research team. 

Read More: Mars Contains an Ocean’s Worth of Water – But It’s Deep Below the Surface

Mars’ Great Dying

Some 250 million years ago, an event took place on Earth known as the great dying, where nearly 80 percent of all life on Earth died. Through analyzing the Curiosity data from this and other reports, the team believes that a great dying event likely happened on Mars too, as the warmer, humid climate shifted to one that was much colder and drier. 

“The abundance of highly soluble salts in these rocks and similar deposits mapped over much of Mars has been used as evidence of the ‘great drying’ of Mars during its dramatic shift from a warm and wet early Mars to its current, cold and dry state,” Tutolo said in a press release.

Researchers have predicted that Mars’ sedimentary carbonate, such as siderite, likely formed under the ancient Red Planet’s carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. Now, thanks to these findings, their predictions may be more concrete. 

A Thinning Atmosphere 

The presence of carbonate on Mars suggests that there was enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to support liquid water on the planet’s surface. However, at some point in time, the atmosphere thinned and turned that carbon dioxide into rock. 

“The broader implications are [that] the planet was habitable up until this time, but then, as the CO2 that had been warming the planet started to precipitate as siderite, it likely impacted Mars’ ability to stay warm,” Tutolo said in a press release. 

“The question looking forward is how much of this CO2 from the atmosphere was actually sequestered? Was that potentially a reason we began to lose habitability?” he added in the release. 

According to Tutolo, this researcher is similar to projects on Earth that aim to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into carbonates as a way to mitigate climate change. It’s possible that these findings could help keep Earth a thriving, hospitable planet in the future. 

“Learning about the mechanisms of making these minerals on Mars helps us to better understand how we can do it here,” Tutolo said in a press release. “Studying the collapse of Mars’ warm and wet early days also tells us that habitability is a very fragile thing.”

NASA’s Curiosity team will continue to look for other sulfate-rich areas on the Red Planet to help provide more evidence to back up this data and to better understand how Mars transformed with the loss of its atmosphere. Understanding Mars could help us better understand Earth. 

“The most remarkable thing about Earth is that it’s habitable and it has been for at least four billion years,” Tutolo said in a press release. “Something happened to Mars that didn’t happen to Earth.”

Read More: Evidence of Ancient Beaches Shows Us a Mars With Large, Ice-Free Oceans

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A graduate of UW-Whitewater, Monica Cull wrote for several organizations, including one that focused on bees and the natural world, before coming to Discover Magazine. Her current work also appears on her travel blog and Common State Magazine. Her love of science came from watching PBS shows as a kid with her mom and spending too much time binging Doctor Who.