Many of Earth’s citizens have turned their eyes to Mars as a planetary prime for human colonization, and much of this optimism is based on the idea that the now barren and frozen planet was once full of water and green plant life. Warming things up, as SpaceX director Elon Musk has posed on several occasions, would theoretically bring Mars back to a more Earth-like state. A recent study published in the journal Natural science has cast doubt on this restorative thinking. Instead of a world formed by flowing rivers and lakes on the surface, the publication suggests that the red planet got most of its fluid water-suggestive functions from moving glaciers and rivers flowing beneath it.
“The southern highlands of Mars are dissected by hundreds of valley networks, which is evidence that water once sculpted the surface … Earlier interpretations of the geological record require precipitation and surface water runoff to form the valley networks, in contrast to climate simulations which are a cold , icy ancient Mars, “states the abstract of the paper.” Here we present a worldwide comparative study of valley network morphometry … with physical models of fluvial [river-formed], groundwater sap [erosion] and glacial and subglacial erosion. We found that valley formation involved all of these processes, but that subglacial and fluvial erosion are the predominant mechanisms. ”
In other words, like theory in this study by Anna Grau Galofre and others., entitled “Valley formation on early Mars by subglacial and fluvial erosion, ”The geographic features of Mars were not likely to be formed by precipitation from an environment like ours on Earth. The planet has always been far too cold to support the weather patterns needed to be possible. Of course, that does not mean that terraforming is out of the picture, just that it may be a newer state of existence for Mars than we thought.
Remarkably, Elon Musk took to Twitter this week to discuss his hopes of making things more human-friendly, even as green will be a new color for the planet. “There is a lot of frozen CO2 & H2O on Mars. Warming the planet will make the atmosphere denser. It is solvable, ”Musk said tweeted in response to a discussion of the planet’s topography. The CEO has previously outlined his plans for making this event happen – using nuclear bombs.
“Nuke Mars! T-shirt soon, ”he wrote on Twitter last year, then inspired dozens of shirt designs with the motto to go on sale. “Nuke Mars refers to a continuous stream of very low-velocity nuclear fusion explosions above the atmosphere to create artificial senses. Much like our sun, this Mars would not be radioactive, “he later explained. SpaceX is currently selling coffee mugs with a Mars image that transforms as heated in a show of enthusiasm for Musk’s plans.
There is a lot of frozen CO2 & H2O on Mars. Warming the planet will make the atmosphere denser. It is soluble.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2020
Another important part of the ‘green’ Mars theory is that it is well-suited for the search for ancient extraterrestrial life. NASA’s latest rover Perseverance, currently on its way to the red planet, will investigate with astrobiology as its main mission. The rover’s landing destination will be a 28-kilometer-wide crater named Jezero (translation: “lake”) that presumably held water billions of years ago. NASA’s 2012 Curiosity mission found that Mars was generally rich in material that could potentially have supported microbial life, and the Perseverance mission will gather evidence to back up this claim. That evidence, in the form of examples, will be brought back to earth in a future mission.
A video published by Anton Petrov provides some further perspective and visual surrounding this recent study on Mars’ icy cold against green past. You can view it below:
