The Martian permafrost may be hiding veins of habitable liquid water

Mars may have a network of liquid water flowing through the frozen ground. All buried permafrost, on Earth and beyond, is expected to host narrow veins of liquid, and new calculations show on Mars, they could be big enough to support living organisms.

“For Mars we always live on the edge of maybe habitable, maybe not, so I set out to do this research thinking maybe I can close this loop and say that it’s very unlikely to have enough water and have it be arranged so that it’s habitable for microbes,” says Hanna Sizemore at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona. “I proved myself wrong.”