NASA has discovered mysterious ‘spider webs’ in a previously unexplored area near Mars’ equator.
The agency’s Curiosity rover has been dispatched to investigate these bizarre structures – which cover a six to twelve mile stretch of Martian desert – as the machine searches for signs that this long desolate world once supported alien life.
Geologists suspect that the spider webs are a giant version of a type of crystallized minerals known as a “boxwork,” found in some caves on Earth.
The ceiling of Wind Cave in North Dakota features some of America’s most cobwebbed boxwork. The web-like shapes form because calcium carbonate mineral water seeps into cracks between softer rocks, hardens into crystals, and remains much like a web of webs as those other rocks erode over time.
But the vast, more than 8,000-acre (3,800-hectare) coffin on Mars is different in that it was likely formed by Martian seawater and may have captured fossils of ancient life in its web.
“These ridges will contain minerals that crystallized underground, where it would have been warmer,” said geologist Dr. Kirsten Siebach of Rice University.
“Microbes from early Earth could have survived in a similar environment,” Dr. Siebach explained – making the “salty liquid water” that created these Martian webs an ideal location to find lingering fossil evidence of ancient alien microbes.
The discovery comes after Australian researchers found that a Martian meteorite that crashed in northwest Africa provides more evidence of hot water on Mars.
A chemical analysis of that meteorite suggests that conditions were ripe for the development of aquatic life on Earth’s nearest neighbor more than four billion years ago.
According to satellite mapping work by ‘Mars Geologist’ Dr Kirsten Siebach, at least 113.6 billion liters of salty, warm mineral water would have been needed to create the vast field of crystal tissue (above), which is about as large or larger. then Los Angles Airport (LAX)
NASA’s planetary geologists suspect the webs are a giant version of a type of crystallized minerals known as a “boxwork,” found in caves on Earth. Above, North Dakota’s Wind Cave National Park has some of America’s most spider-webbed ‘boxwork’ on its ceiling
Since first parachuting to the surface of Mars on August 6, 2012, Curiosity has been surveying the Red Planet for signs of life — and hunting for clues about its climate, geology and the origins of all of Earth’s ancient water. Mars.
But NASA researchers have long been intrigued by the vast geological spider web, ever since their Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite first captured aerial images of this eerie landscape on December 10, 2006.
How such formations could appear on the surface of Mars is still a mystery, but theories point to the climate chaos that robbed Mars of its water billions of years ago.
The likelihood that evidence of microbial life on Mars could be captured as fossils in this giant web “makes this an exciting place to explore,” Dr. Siebach noted.
This web of potentially dead alien microbes and insects rests in the shadow of a three-mile-high mountain, officially known as ‘Aeolis Mon’, but nicknamed ‘Mount Sharp’.
Previous explorations by the Curiosity rover have revealed many sedimentary layers along Mount Sharp’s rock walls, indicating in detail that it was formed by water erosion via ancient lake deposits.
NASA scientists suspect that this erosion contributed to the formation of the giant crystal spider web, when mineral-rich pulses of water seeped through Mount Sharp and flowed into fractures in the surface rock and then crystallized.
According to satellite mapping work Dr. Siebach published in 2014, it would have taken at least 113.6 billion liters of salty, warm mineral water to create the vast field of crystal tissue, which is larger than Los Angles Airport (LAX).
Above, NASA’s Curiosity rover takes a “robotic selfie” on the Red Planet via its arm-mounted Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). Each of the rover’s selfies is actually a composite image made up of dozens of high-resolution photos taken from different angles by the MAHLI camera.
Above, another view of the boxwork webs on the ceiling of Wind River Cave in North Dakota
“This is a significant amount of groundwater that must have been present,” she and her co-author wrote in their paper the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
“It is known on Earth that mineralization,” the type of crystal formation that likely occurred here, “helps facilitate the preservation of once habitable environments,” they noted.
And this month, scientists in Australia working with the Martian meteor NWA 7034, discovered after it crashed in northwest Africa, found even more evidence that ancient warm oceans on Mars could easily have supported alien life.
“We used nanoscale geochemistry to detect elemental evidence of hot water on Mars 4.45 billion years ago,” planetary scientist Dr. Aaron Cavosie said in a statement.
“Geochemical markers of water” were discovered on meteor NWA 7034, Dr. Cavosie explained, based on both the shape of the rocky grain patterns and the chemical composition: ‘telltale signs of watery fluids from the time the grain was formed.’
It is believed that NWA 7034 was ejected by an asteroid impact on Mars that created a crater to the northeast of the ‘Terra Cimmeria-Sirenum’ province in Mars’ southern hemisphere.
The Curiosity rover captured this panorama on November 2, 2024, as it left Mars’ so-called ‘Gediz Vallis’ channel on its way to the mysterious giant spider web formation
Above, another panorama taken by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover before it left Gediz Vallis
A special technique used to date the age of incredibly old zircon minerals via trace amounts of radioactive material, called ‘uranium-lead dating’, found that this meteor consisted of one of the oldest volcanic rocks on Mars ever obtained.
“The team identified elemental patterns in this unique zircon, including iron, aluminum, yttrium and sodium,” said Dr. Cavosie, “through nanoscale imaging and spectroscopy.”
“These elements were added when the zircon formed 4.45 billion years ago,” he continued, “suggesting that water was present during Mars’ early magmatic activity.”
This mixture of hot and mineral-rich water, similar to the hydrothermal vents that support life deep in Earth’s oceans, points to the possibility that life developed on Mars billions of years ago, amid all this volcanic activity.
‘Hydrothermal systems were essential to the development of life on Earth,’ Dr Cavosie explained, ‘and our findings suggest that Mars also had water, a key ingredient for habitable environments, during its earliest history of crust formation.’
The Australian planetary scientist and his team at Curtin University in Australia published their results in the journal Scientific progress last Friday.
In its decade-plus on the Red Planet, NASA’s Curiosity rover has traveled about 20 miles (32 kilometers) of the Martian surface in search of clues about the life that once thrived there.
Curiosity will begin studying the spider web bridges up close in 2025 NASA Administrator Bill Nelsonwhere it will reside for a “month’s journey through the coffinwork of Mars.”