Future Mars prospectors will likely find mineral riches in some unusual settings, say planetary scientists studying the different ways valuable metals might have been concentrated on the red planet.
On Earth, surface waters, ground waters and even chemicals left by living things play major roles in leaching, concentrating and depositing valuable metals and minerals like iron, gold, silver, nickel, copper and many more.
But on Mars there are no oceans or surface waters; no microorganisms either. What’s more, the planet is so cold that even groundwater is frozen as permafrost and functions as little more than another mineral in the ground.
So where does a starving miner look on Mars for usable quantities of ore?