Posted by tourdemars to Life on Mars at December 19, 2005 10:43 PM

A University of California, Berkeley, study of methane-producing bacteria frozen at the bottom of Greenland’s two-mile thick ice sheet could help guide scientists searching for similar bacterial life on Mars. Methane is a greenhouse gas present in the atmospheres of both Earth and Mars. If a class of ancient microbes called Archaea are the source of Mars’ methane, as some scientists have proposed, then unmanned probes to the Martian surface should look for them at depths where the temperature is about 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than that found at the base of the Greenland ice sheet, according to UC Berkeley lead researcher P. Buford Price, a professor of physics. This would be several hundred meters - some 1,000 feet - underground, where the temperature is slightly warmer than freezing and such microbes should average about one every cubic centimeter, or about 16 per cubic inch.