What’s behind the Martian Methane Mystery? Is it a sign of life, or just some strange chemical process? Or are we just fooling ourselves? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Episode Transcription (Auto Generated)

In August 2012, the curiosity rover landed on Mars and began, well, roving around. This car sized robot carried a full suite of scientific instruments that could extend, poke, and examine a variety of properties of the Martian soil and atmosphere. One of those instruments was called the tunable laser spectrometer. Which was designed to precisely measure levels of oxygen, carbon dioxide, methane and other gases in the era of Mars. And when it came to methane, the Curiosity rover found nothing.

Or at least nothing below its detection threshold of around 5 parts per billion. Meaning that if there was methane, there had to be less than that. But essentially, it meant no methane because last time I checked, 5 parts per billion is not a lot. And if that were the end of the story, this would be the shortest episode of Ask A Spaceman I've ever made. Closing credits.

See you next time. The usual. But it's not. We haven't even done the Patreon ad yet. It's not the end of the story because in late 2013 and early 2014, Curiosity reported a spike in the levels of methane.

And not just a little bit, but up to a factor of 10. All of a sudden, there was 10 times more methane around the rover than there was before. And that's still not exactly a lot of methane, but it is weird. And what's doubly weird is that after a few months, the spike went away. The methane levels dropped back down below the detection limits.

And then a few months later, it spiked back up again. And then again and again. In total, Curiosity measured 7 methane spikes over the course of a few years. And what's weirder, those spikes also seem to correspond with the onset of the Martian summer. So now we have a mystery on our hands.

We're getting spikes in methane that seem to come and go with the seasons. They also come out of nowhere, and then they just disappear a few months later. And as usual in science, we have something in nature happening, and it's our job to explain it. Now I'm going to tell you upfront that we don't understand the Martian methane mystery. We don't.

And that's what makes this episode so much fun. I love these kinds of episodes where we don't really know the answer. We only have a few possibilities. And I like these kinds of episodes because it means I don't get to just tell one story. But in this case, I get to tell 3.

There are 3 different paths to explaining the Martian methane mystery. And, yes, I have coined that phrase and I will use it as much as possible. I have 3 possible stories. There are 3 plausible, well grounded, but still flawed ways to approach this mystery. And it's so much fun to tell all 3.

And so I'm going to share the 3 plausible stories with you, and then it's up to you to decide. I mean, actually, it's up to the evidence ultimately and for the research to decide which one is correct. But for now, until we get that evidence, until we get the further research, it's up to you to decide which one you like the best. So let's get started. And we need to take a quick break folks to mention that this show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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Overcome your fears with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/spaceman today to get 10% off your 1st month. That's better help, he l p.com/ spaceman. Let's start with the first possible story to explain the Martian methane mystery. And that's that Mars just has some funky chemistry going on.

I mean, it's plausible. We can all agree that Mars is weird. And as much as we'd like it to be similar to the Earth and pretend that we can just walk around on the surface and check out the Martian landscape, it's really not. Mars is very, very different than the Earth. It has very different chemistry, geology, history.

There are some things it has in common because, you know, elements are elements. They can only interact in certain ways under certain conditions. But Mars has some some extra special stuff going on with it. So maybe there's something funky on Mars generating methane. Now, there are a lot of ways to generate methane.

I mean, it's not that complex of a molecule. It's just a carbon atom with 4 hydrogen buddies. And last time I checked, which by now is pretty much daily, the universe is really great at making both carbon and hydrogen atoms. So putting them together is a synch. You just have to get the right combination at the right time, and boom, you can make methane.

All you need to do to make methane is to follow a simple three step process. Step 1, find some molecules with carbon in it. Step 2, find some molecules with hydrogen in it. Step 3, get them to react with each other to form methane. This this is why I'm not a chemist.

Okay. So the carbon part is easy because most of Mars' atmosphere is made of carbon dioxide. There's a whole bunch of carbon just laying around in the atmosphere. Yes. I know Mars barely has an atmosphere.

It's less than 1%. The air pressure on the Earth, etcetera, etcetera. I know. But it's still there, and there's still a lot of it, especially compared to the amount of methane that we're trying to produce. We're talking 5 parts per billion in the spikes.

You know, it's it's not much more than that. So we don't need to make a lot of methane, and there's plenty of carbon hanging out. Once you have carbon, in fact, once you have carbon dioxide, there's even an official chemistry process called Fischer Trappch synthesis that converts a mixture of carbon dioxide and hydrogen into various compounds including our friend methane. So if you have hydrogen and you have carbon dioxide, there are already known chemical reactions under the right conditions that can give you methane. A one common version of this process is called the Sabatier reaction, which you may have heard of if you're a chemistry nerd.

If you haven't, then you haven't. But now you have. So it happens. We know how to make it. Like, you you just get some hydrogen over here, some carbon dioxide over here.

You you get the right temperatures and pressures, which are both pretty high, and boom, you make a bunch of stuff including methane. That synthesis just sorta happens under the right conditions, so we don't have to sweat that part. Like, if you can get hydrogen, we know through these reactions that it can react with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or carbon dioxide that's trapped underground, carbon dioxide that's pretty much anywhere, and you can get methane. But what about the hydrogen? We need to get the hydrogen to get this process started.

To get this official chemistry process off the ground, we need some free floating hydrogen. Now there's tons of hydrogen all over the place. Hydrogen is basically everywhere even on the Earth. The problem is that hydrogen is really friendly, does not like to exist on its own, and it's locked up in all sorts of molecules like, water. There's hydrogen everywhere.

You're you're made of so much hydrogen. There's so may so much hydrogen in the molecules that make you up, but that's not the way we like it. In order to get this reaction going with carbon dioxide, we need free hydrogen. Thankfully, scientists being scientists, chemists being chemists, they've devised a number of potential ways to liberate the hydrogen that's just hanging out on Mars but locked up inside of other molecules and get it to some nearby carbon dioxide to make some methane happen. For example, if you take some water and put it up against some iron rich rocks, like you just take an iron rich rock and drop it inside of water, the water can oxidize the iron and in the process, releases some hydrogen.

And the same can happen with magnesium rich rocks. In fact, it's best if you have both iron and magnesium. You get double the effect. And in fact, there is this an entire mineral, this greenish mineral called olivine that if you take olivine and you get it wet, the water reacts with the magnesium and iron in the olivine, and then you get some free hydrogen out of the process. So what this means is that if Mars has water and olivine, we've got everything we need.

They react together to release hydrogen. The hydrogen reacts with the carbon dioxide and out pops methane. The olivine is a check. It's one of the most abundant minerals on Mars. We already know that.

So yay. But the water yeah. That's gonna be a tough one. Here's the thing. Mars is kind of dry.

We checked. We looked. We roved around even. There's there's water. There is water on Mars, but it's frozen.

There it's in ice caps. It's in permafrost. There isn't liquid water. And for this trick to work, to generate methane through this chemical process, you need liquid water. Now we know, however, that Mars used to have liquid water deep in its past, 1000000000 of years ago.

There were oceans, rivers, streams. It was a a warm, wet planet. Then it sorta kinda died and lost all of its liquid water. So in order to make methane, you need to have liquid water. Liquid water on Mars is definitely not on the surface.

It's definitely not in the air. That's kind of the definition of liquid. The only place where we might find liquid water is deep underground where the pressures and temperatures are high enough to take random water clumps of ice and liquefy them. And and this is backed up by recent studies. There have been some, deep, like, radar scans of of the surface penetrating underneath the ground.

We think there are, patches of water under Mars. I don't wanna call them reservoirs. I don't I don't want you to think of, like, giant underground tanks filled with liquid water. That's not what it's like. It's more like we're pretty sure or at least we're on the road to being pretty sure that there are some areas underneath the surface of Mars that are kinda sorta moist.

Where there is rocks with little bits of liquid water tucked in their crevices where it's warm enough. The pressures are high enough that water exists as a liquid form. But it's it's here and there. It's it's not drenched or even soaked or even other word that implies a lot of water, but it's just sorta kind of moist. Like like a cake that's you wouldn't describe as moist, but you wouldn't describe as dry either.

There's just a little bit of water, and it sits in that in between zone. That's the most we're gonna get about potentially known liquid water on Mars. But if that liquid water is present, it can unlock all of these chemical reactions. The water can presumably interact with olivine, which is we know is under the surface of Mars. It's one of the most common minerals.

This releases hydrogen. The hydrogen then finds some carbon dioxide. There are pockets of carbon dioxide trapped underground. Again, not giant reservoirs, but just little crevices here and there. And then they get together and then they release methane.

The methane seeps to the surface and gets released. So if chemistry is your thing and rocks your groove, then Mars might just have everything you need to make methane. But here's the thing. If this process is happening all the time, why does it shut off? Why do we get these spikes of methane?

Why isn't there just, you know, a lot of methane on Mars and it's as simple as that? We need something to destroy the methane. If we're going to have some sort of process that generates methane continuously on Mars, like underground methane is just seeping to the surface through all of these chemical reactions, we need something to destroy the methane as soon as it appears. And and we do know that methane is not stable on Mars. There's so much UV radiation from the sun pouring into its thin atmosphere.

That radiation could just smash apart methane no problem. And if the UV doesn't get you, then oxidation will convert that methane back into carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. So we know that methane does not last long in the Martian atmosphere, but here's the problem. All those known mechanisms of destroying methane take 100 of years to play out. So let's say there's some giant pocket of methane just that just like like a plume of methane that goes into the Martian atmosphere.

It would take centuries for that plume of methane to finally be destroyed. Instead, we're seeing methane disappear in a matter of months. So it's we have, like, a double problem here. We need to generate the methane, and we need to get rid of it. And the problem with the rocks did it hypothesis is that you can't have both.

You can make a slow steady stream of methane with all these chemistry processes with water and olivine and then carbon dioxide. You can get a steady stream of methane. But how do you get a spike of methane out of nowhere in the background in just a few months? And then how do you get rid of it just as quickly? There are some ideas.

You could say, okay. Maybe the methane is released in quick bursts. Okay. So maybe it's not a slow steady stream of methane. Maybe, there's, like, pockets where a lot of water gets together with a lot of olivine and a lot of carbon dioxide, and they generate a lot of methane really quickly, and it blooms up to the surface.

And then, you know, and here I'm just waving my arms vaguely. There's some background process ready to eat it as soon as it's released. Like, you only cook dinner once a day. And for a brief moment in time, there's a big spike in the measured prepared food levels in your house. But there's a background process, hunger, that destroys the food as soon as it appears.

So if you have some mechanism in place that is able to destroy the methane much much quicker than the usual things like UV radiation or oxidation or anything. Oh, yeah. We can't rely on these century long processes because we need to destroy the methane as soon as it appears. So you need some background process, and you need to be able to release the methane in, like, quick bursts. So maybe there are pockets of methane.

You know, this happens on the Earth. It's not that crazy. We have, like, volcanoes and stuff. We have underground stuff. I'm not a geologist here.

I'm I'm I'm just spitballing here. You know, there's there's some, like, some chemical reaction that happens underground. It releases a whole bunch of gas. We know this happens on the Earth. And then you need some process that can just just eat at that methane as soon as it appears.

We don't know what those processes might be. The mysteries just keep piling on. There are some ideas. Maybe the methane just slinks its way back underground very quickly. Maybe the methane interacts with the dust grains flying around on Mars, and this cannibalizes the methane very quickly.

Maybe the methane very quickly finds some spare oxygen atoms that are floating around and reacts within it. It gets destroyed before it gets a chance to spread or even reach the upper atmosphere. You know, there are a lot of ideas for how to destroy the methane quickly on Mars. I'm gonna leave those mostly to the side besides this brief mention because we can only get so many layers deep in our Martian methane mystery tour here. And so we need to keep addressing the production.

How could methane be released in quick bursts? We can't have a slow and steady stream. We're gonna assume that there's some process that destroys methane very quickly. We won't handle that side of the equation. Let's let's talk about the generation part.

Maybe there are pockets where some subtle geological process suddenly gets a lot of water to react with a lot of olivine and release a big vent of methane. Maybe it's already there. There are these minerals called clathrate hydrates, which are essentially slurry of of dirt and rocks and ice. These would have been created a long time ago when Mars was wet and then buried deep underground. And then but not so far underground that they melted, and only just now they're getting heated by the interior.

They melt, and then they release these big plumes of methane. Sorry to be crude, but in this case, it's like Mars farts every once in a while and Curiosity happen to catch a whiff of it. Maybe it's volcanoes. They release a lot of gases very quickly. I don't know, but not a lot of volcanoes on Mars.

Maybe it's lightning strikes. The dust storms on Mars can trigger all, significant lightning strikes. And then if you have some electrical discharge, plus water ice and dry ice, that can make methane in a quick burst, but also not a lot. Maybe meteorites falling onto Mars. They interact with the Martian atmosphere generates some methane.

Yeah. But I'm reaching here. In fact, everyone is reaching here. Because we know of chemical processes that can generate methane. But we don't know a lot of processes that can generate methane very quickly in very sudden bursts.

There's a whole other side of the problem which is how do you destroy the methane, but, yeah, we'll solve that later. Let's just focus on the creating methane quickly. We don't know how. So none of the processes based on normal chemistry are all that grand. Sure, they all show promise.

But they all have difficulty explaining the variability part. How do you get burst of methane? And so, enter our second story. Maybe Morris is alive. I mean, why not?

We're confronted with the strange observation that we can't explain. And it's not like we're trying to invoke intelligence here, which is always a difficult one for me to swallow because intelligent beings can do anything that they want. These are just normal living critters, microbes, eating stuff, and excreting other stuff, and generally getting on with doing their thing. Okay. Like I say, in science, we like crazy ideas.

You're allowed to come to the convention with your crazy idea just under one condition. You have to take your idea seriously. And that means you can't just toss it out there and walk away. You have to do your homework. You have to show how the crazy idea is plausible and connects with everything else we know about the universe.

And what we know about the universe is that Mars is dead. And not just a little dead, hang like hanging on by a thread or even recently deceased. No. It's super dead. There's been no apparent life on the surface for a few 1000000000 years.

So saying maybe life makes the methane, it's not rocks, maybe it's life, is going to run you smack center into the counter argument that Mars is doesn't have life, at least on the surface. If we're going to make this work, the martian life has to be deep underground. We see zero signs of life on the surface, and the surface of Mars is rather inhospitable. So if Mars is going to host life, it has to be deep underground. How deep?

Kilometers deep, probably deep enough where it's warm enough for liquid water, but not too warm where, you know, it gets destroyed by the heat. And being deep enough for liquid water isn't that huge of an assumption since we also need liquid water for many of the rock based chemistry based methane generation mechanisms. Like, we're gonna have to go underground no matter what to explain the Martian methane mystery. And if we're going underground and we're needing liquid water, hey. It's just one more step to say, okay.

If there's liquid water, maybe there are living creatures there too. Yeah. I mean, that's a huge step, but it's a step. Okay. So we're going to go deep underground and look at tiny little critters like single celled organisms and see if they can be responsible for generating the methane.

But we can't just have any single celled critters. They can't use sunlight to produce energy because they're underground. They can't use oxygen to produce energy because there's no oxygen. But thankfully, on earth, we have such a rich diversity of life that we can point to critters, actual living organisms that can serve as a useful analogy. Meet the methanogens.

Methanogens are single celled organisms that, you guessed it, produce methane as a part of their metabolism. Like, as natural as can be. There are about a 150 known species of them. They all fit into the domain of life called archaea which as far as I can tell is the biological equivalent of the junk drawer in your house. And to get their energy, they eat hydrogen.

Which is weird, but we won't inquire into their personal lives all that much. Like most other life on earth, methanogens need carbon to build themselves, and then but then they eat hydrogen to sustain themselves, and then they produce methane as a byproduct. So, if we want these living creatures, if we want methanogens to be responsible for creating the methane on Mars, To support this kind of Martian life, you just need a source of carbon because that's how they build themselves. They that's how they construct themselves. And you need a source of hydrogen because that's what they eat.

So all you need to do to make methanogens is to follow a simple three step process. Step 1, have a wait a minute. This is the same setup as the chemical stuff. What's going on? What's going on is that to make methane from life on Mars, you need basically the same setup as what you need to make methane from non life on Mars.

To have a chemical process be responsible for generating methane, it comes down to needing hydrogen and carbon. And our best guess for generating that process, kick starting that process is to have liquid water underground. If instead you want life to be responsible for creating the methane on Mars, and we look around to examples that we can point to on the Earth, then you need the exact same setup. You need a source of carbon. You need a source of hydrogen.

You need liquid water to interact with iron and magnesium rich rocks to produce free hydrogen that the methanogens can then eat and turn into methane. What's different here is that instead of some official chemistry process like the Fischer Tropsch synthesis, you instead have patreon. That's patreon.com/pmsutter. And that is how you can produce methane on Mars. That is by contributing every single month, and I can't express my thanks enough for your support.

That's patreon.com/pmsutter. Now instead of some official chemistry process taking these raw ingredients and turning it into methane, you have some complex biochemical pathway that uses the same elements to process and extract and store energy. And that's, like, exactly what life is. Life is turning random chemical processes into methods for extracting and storing energy. That that's what life does.

That's what we do. So at first glance, introducing life into this picture doesn't give you a lot of advantage because you still need the same basic setup, the same overall picture you need. Liquid water, underground, interacting with rocks, producing hydrogen, and then instead of doing some simple chemistry process, you have some ultra complex biochemical process. So at first glance, introducing life doesn't get you very far, but the biggest way that life helps solve the Martian methane mystery is the variability, the seasonal changes. Life on earth undergoes lots and lots of seasonal changes as this planet receives more or less energy from the sun.

Martian life is deep enough where all these processes can play out, but maybe it's shallow enough that it's still sensitive to the temperatures on the surface. That is the biggest advantage that introducing the the complexity of life into this problem is that you are able to naturally explain the seasonal variability. Because life responds seasonally. And you know what? If that's too much to swallow for life to explain the Martian methane mystery, I'll never get tired of saying that.

That life doesn't have to be alive today. Maybe it was alive in the past, and there are these deep methane deposits that are buried underground for 1000000000 of years ago. And once again, we have these, occasional warm spots and like there's a little bit of shifting underneath the surface, and then Mars lets go of a of a plume of methane. So maybe it's just ancient life that did this, and we're just seeing the continued byproduct. Or maybe it's alive.

But still, the maybe Mars is alive hypothesis doesn't answer all the observations. Most importantly, we have no evidence that Mars is alive. And we can't point to the methane by itself because that would be a bit circular, don't you think? So as as of right now, methane as a marker for Martian methanogens, I'm very proud of that phrasing, is a bit thin on the thin side. And there are issues like the fact that life usually doesn't just produce methane by itself, but it also produces other gases like ethane, which we don't see at all.

So the Martian methanogens have to be similar to Earth methanogens, but have some extra weird characteristics, which just, you know, adds more complexity or there need to be some extra mechanisms that get rid of the ethane and the other byproducts of these microscopic critters, but that just adds complexity to the story. So life is very appealing because it can naturally explain the variability, but it comes with a lot of baggage. And so, here's our third story. Some researchers just wanna throw a wet blanket on the whole thing and argue that the data itself are junk. They rightly point out that there have been signs of methane on Mars going back decades all the way back to the Mariner missions well before Curiosity's curious little spikes.

But as time has gone on, our measurements of the amount of methane have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. We used to think there was a lot more methane on Mars with our earlier observations, and now we think there's barely any. We're at the point now where we're measuring abundances to a few parts per billion on a good day, which let's be honest, isn't much different than 0. And we are measuring such minute amounts that maybe there are other sources of contamination or instrument error. Maybe we're misreading the data.

Maybe it's just wishful thinking. Where we're seeing this seasonal pattern, but honestly yeah. I've talked about this seasonal pattern, but it's not like we have a lot of data points here. It's not like curiosity is watching this rise up in real time. No.

It's like sampling, like, every few months, and then we see a slightly elevated level. Maybe there's something in the data. Maybe it's just noise. Maybe it's just junk. Plus, there have been a lot of measurements, especially global measurements, that haven't found any methane at all.

So it's not like every instrument we throw at Mars measures some sort of methane. Some instruments measure 0 methane. Never see any methane at all. By and large, most of the scientific community believes that the methane observations on Mars are real. But if you want to argue that it's just wishful thinking and hopeful interpretations of very sparse data, it's not the first time that's happened in science.

So, you know, I won't get in your way. And if you've got an idea of your own, let's hear it. Well, if you have an idea, you have to take it seriously and hear the facts you have to cover. There's very little methane on Mars, at least on a global scale in the upper atmosphere. Sometimes there are spikes where methane concentrations jump up by a factor of 10 in the span of a couple months, and these spikes seem to correlate with the onset of Martian summer.

And then a couple months later, the methane goes away. We know that to generate methane, you have to have some freely accessible hydrogen, and then that hydrogen has to undergo some other process, either through nonliving chemistry processes or living biochemistry processes to bind with carbon. And then there has to be some other process that scrubs the methane out of the atmosphere just as quickly as it appears. But like I said, we're not gonna focus too much on that part today. But if you want to explain the entire methane mystery on Mars, you have to you have to fold that into your discussion.

So what's the deal? Honestly, we don't know. We don't know if the methane on Mars is a sign of life or a sign of interesting new chemistry. There are more maybes and what ifs in any of these stories than usual because we're in a state of relative ignorance. And here we are finally and actually at the end of the episode.

And you're probably left wondering which story is the truth. Is it weird chemistry? Is it weird life? Is it weird data? But all the stories have flaws and shortcomings.

All the stories have promising lines of thought, but also contain some intellectual dead ends. It's all just a big giant confusing muddled mess which to be honest is what science feels like almost all the time. So welcome to the club. Thank you to Paul s and Julia s for the questions that led to today's episode, and thank you to all my Patreon supporters. I can't keep doing this show without you.

That's patreon.com/pmsutter. I'd like to give a special shout out to the top contributors this month. They are Justin g, Chris l, Alberto m, Duncan m, Corey d stargazer, Robert b, Nyla, Sam r, John s, Joshua Scott m, Rob h, Scott m, Lewis m, John w, Alexis Gilbert m, Rob w, Dennis a, Jules r, Mike g, Jim l, Scott j, David s, William w, Scott r, Heather, Mike s, Michelle r, Pete h, Steve s, Wat Watbird, Elisa r, Coosie, and Kevin b. Atpatreon.com/pmsutter. Keep those questions coming.

You know, I get excited every time I get a question. It's like Christmas in in my email inbox. It is so much fun to see the questions come in. Add them to the list, and then, it's a joy every single time I go to do a new episode. I can't I can't describe how much fun I'm having.

Sharing all these interesting little corners of science with you. Keep those questions coming. It's askaspaceman@gmail.com. Or there's a form you can fill out on the website, askaspaceman.com. Keep those reviews coming into, Apple Music, whatever they're calling it now.

Spotify, all your usual podcast players. It really helps keep the show visible and out there, and I will see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space.

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