IMAGE: Si Athena Chen, Penn State
A combination of a once-debunked 19th-century identification of a water-carrying iron mineral and the fact that these rocks are extremely common on Earth, suggests the existence of a substantial water reservoir on Mars, according to a team of geoscientists.
“One of my student’s experiments was to crystalize hematite,” said Peter J. Heaney, professor of geosciences, Penn State. “She came up with an iron-poor compound, so I went to Google Scholar and found two papers from the 1840s where German mineralogists, using wet chemistry, proposed iron-poor versions of hematite that contained water.”
In 1844, Rudolf Hermann named his mineral turgite and in 1847 August Breithaupt named hi...
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