If the water accumulates inside permanently shadowed craters, the barren atmospheres and frigid soils could preserve ice for billions of years.
And though the place now seems dead and barren -- the atmosphere is thin, the surface is bombarded with radiation and it's ferociously dry and cold -- there are several reasons to suppose that life, if it was ever there, could persist to this day.
Soon after he was ordered to Florida, then a terra incognita of cypress swamps, pathless barrens, marshy streams, malarial atmosphere, venomous reptiles, and savage Seminoles.
You may land on a barren wasteland with a lethally toxic atmosphere, or an Eden swarming with exotic wildlife – and once the planet is discovered and generated, it is available for all other players to explore.
Mars, on the other hand, has a very thin atmosphere, no water bodies, and a barren landscape.
Scientists recognize that the climate of the barren planet was once quite different, with a denser, warmer atmosphere, as well as the possibility that liquid water may have flowed on its surface.
Long before I dreamed of becoming a scientist, I wondered why Earth was teeming with life, while Mars was a barren, rocky outpost and Venus was shrouded in a dense atmosphere.
The indistinctly dreamlike, minimally described atmosphere suggests a Kafkaesque cityscape or a near-barren Beckett stage.
When red dwarf stars are young, Dr. Charbonneau pointed out, they are ferociously luminous and might have blown away the planets' atmospheres or caused a runaway greenhouse, leaving them barren.
