MARS, Laniakea Supercluster—The story of Mars has long been considered something of a tragedy told in dust: a once-blue world that potentially held oceans and rivers, slowly bleeding its water into space until nothing remained but iron oxide and silence.

But a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets suggests that rock that looks bone-dry on the surface may have continued to circulate water underground billions of years after its seas evaporated, seeping through ancient sand dunes in Gale Crater and leaving behind mineral deposits that could have preserved traces of microbial life.

The team, led by Dimitra Atri of New York University Abu Dhabi’s Space Exploration Laboratory, compared data from NASA’s Curiosity rover with similar rock formations in the deserts of the United Arab Emirates to reach its conclusions.

“Our findings show that Mars didn’t simply go from wet to dry,” Atri said, according to ScienceDaily. “Even after its lakes and rivers disappeared, small amounts of water continued to move underground, creating protected environments that could have supported microscopic life.”

The mineral the team zeroed in on is gypsum (the same stuff in your drywall), which is significant because of its ability to trap and preserve organic material. If something was ever alive down there, gypsum deposits might be the fossil record scientists have been hunting for.

This finding doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It builds on years of increasingly dramatic discoveries about Martian water. In 2018, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft detected what appeared to be a stable body of liquid brine buried beneath the south polar ice cap using its MARSIS radar instrument, as published in Science. More recently, ESA radar data revealed a massive ice deposit beneath the Medusae Fossae Formation near the Martian equator—a reservoir so large that if melted, it could cover the entire planet in roughly 2.7 meters of water, according to analysis of Mars Express MARSIS data.

Meanwhile, the strange geometric formations on Mars continue to fuel a parallel conversation. Pyramid-shaped structures in the Candor Chasma region, first identified by researcher Keith Laney in 2001 using NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor imagery, have recently gone viral again. NASA, for its part, has consistently maintained these are natural geological features shaped by erosion and landslides.

Life on Mars has long fascinated Earthlings, and recent discoveries have only sharpened the appetite to learn more about our neighbor’s past. The U.S. government, at least, was interested at one point, according to declassified CIA archives released in the 90s. They detail “Project Stargate,” a Cold War–era U.S. Army and intelligence remote-viewing program that once tasked a subject, in a 1984 session titled “Mars Exploration May 22, 1984,” with psychically “visiting” Mars one million years B.C. The remote viewer described pyramids, a large road, and “very tall, thin people.”

But the real story isn’t about pyramids or psychic spies, but rather what water means for life. Every new finding, from subsurface radar signatures to gypsum-laced dunes, points to the same mind-boggling possibility: Mars may not have been dead for as long as we assumed.