Humans may well not be the first form of life in the solar system to face the threat of survival due to their own life activity, which affected the climatic conditions of their home planet. The fact is that scientists have officially presented a new model, which suggests that earlier Mars was quite suitable for life, but due to a sharp change in climate, all living creatures on its surface simply died out. And, according to experts, the living beings themselves are to blame for this – thanks to their merciless life activity, the climatic conditions on Mars have changed catastrophically, destroying all life without a chance of existence.
Scientists have said that earlier on Mars there was an appropriate ecology and climate to support the life of special forms of microbes. These microbes in the course of their life produced methane, which, apparently, destroyed the atmosphere and climate of the planet, thereby putting an end to the existence of microbes. As a result, Mars is currently an extremely cold and dry planet, with an incredibly thin atmosphere. At the same time, specialists with the help of rovers and orbiting scientific stations have long come to the conclusion that earlier on this planet there were many rivers, deltas, lakes and, probably, even entire oceans with liquid water.
These are more than suitable conditions for the existence of microorganisms like methanogens – they consume carbon dioxide and hydrogen, producing methane. Similarly, there are plants on planet Earth, only instead of methane, they emit harmless and much-needed oxygen. Scientists have even simulated a scenario in which special methanogen microbes could have lived on Mars many millions of years ago. And their computer model confirmed that these microbes could not only exist on the surface of the planet, but also thrive on early Mars.
The same model confirmed that if microbes began to interact with the atmosphere and ecology of the planet, then their life would be quite short – microbes, due to their numbers, could remove too much hydrogen from the atmosphere, replacing it with methane. Due to this, with their own vital activity, they caused global cooling in just a few hundred thousand years, which eventually led Mars to the state in which it is now. But, of course, no matter how interesting this model may seem, so far this is just an assumption – no one can describe the history of Mars for sure yet.
Source: Trash Box
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