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While kayaking or rafting probably wouldn’t have been recommended, the ancient waterways of Mars are helping to redefine the way we view our neighboring world, as an international research team has recently discovered new clues to ancient rivers that some Once they flowed through the landscape of the red planet. Their aqueous discoveries were recently published in the online scientific journal, Nature Communications.
By analyzing a new crop of high-resolution images captured by the HiRISE camera installed on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the scientists were able to transform shots into 3D topographic maps of the Martian area identified as Hellas Basin, one of the world’s most impact craters. massive solar system. What they found along the cliff of a rocky mountain were deep sediment deposits approximately 656 feet high, created by rushing rivers, rising almost twice the height of the White Cliffs of Dover, and extending almost a mile wide.
“Unfortunately we don’t have the ability to scale, look at the details on a smaller scale, but the striking similarities with sedimentary rocks on Earth leave very little to the imagination,” said study lead author Francesco Salese of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. New scientist. “To form these 200-meter-thick reservoirs we needed conditions that would have required an environment capable of maintaining significant volumes of liquid water.”
It has already been established over the years that Mars was once home to multiple lakes, rivers, and possibly even oceans that could have sustained life on some primary level. Today, Mars is frozen at the poles and is subject to intense dust storms, with no sign of liquid water on its surface. However, around the time period when life on Earth began to stir 3.7 billion years ago, Mars was much more temperate and could have provided adequate habitat for life formation.
“Here on Earth, geologists have used sedimentary rocks for generations to impose restrictions on what conditions were like on our planet millions or even billions of years ago,” study co-author William McMahon told phys.org. “We now have the technology to extend this methodology to another terrestrial planet, Mars, which houses an ancient record of sedimentary rocks that extends even further back in time than ours.”
According to their findings, the raging rivers that dug these rocks were likely active for tens to hundreds of thousands of years. These ancient sediment beds could fulfill the promise of life and provide more answers about the distant past of Mars, especially from 2023, when the European Space Agency (ESA) deploys its Rover Rosalind Franklin ExoMars to explore the mysterious terrain of the Red Planet. .
