Mars' Vanished Oceans May Be Trapped Within The Planet, Scientists Say LUCIE AUBOURG & ISSAM AHMED, AFP 16 MARCH 2021 Billions of years ago, Mars was home to lakes and oceans - but where all the water went to transform the planet into the desolate rock we know today has been something of a mystery.
Most of it was thought to have been lost to space, but a new study funded by NASA proposes that it didn't go anywhere but is trapped within minerals in the crust. "We're saying that the crust forms what we call hydrated minerals, so minerals that actually have water in their crystal structure," Eva Scheller, lead author of the new paper in Science, told AFP.