Drilling For Life on Mars

[Tuckerfan]

So what happens if we strike oil?

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

The surface of Mars is covered with craters, caused by crashing meteorites. It was first feared that the damage caused could have made the Red Planet uninhabitable, and that all traces of previous life could have been destroyed.

However, using techniques normally deployed by the oil industry to predict oil and gas deep beneath the surface, Professor John Parnell at the University of Aberdeen has shown that the rocks in a terrestrial crater were not heated so greatly that all evidence of past life would be obliterated, and in fact some microbial life may even have survived the impact.

Scientists have discovered that the crater has retained traces of ancient organic matter that can still be detected millions of years after the fiery crash of a space rock.

Professor Parnell is part of an international team working on the Haughton meteorite impact site in the Canadian High Arctic. He explained: “Working in this remote uninhabited terrain gives us a great opportunity to do detailed sampling where the rocks have not been contaminated by man or covered by vegetation. However, the snow and ice are only melted for a few weeks each year, so we just have a brief window when the work has to be completed.”

And I’ll note that it took forever for the bloody page to load on my machine.

[GorillaMan]

No opion, but the problems with the page can be avoided by using Google’s cached version: http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:xapln9quHykJ:www.abdn.ac.uk/mediareleases/release.php%3Fid%3D240+&hl=en