The face of mars recent photo5/4/2023 ![]() It also shows these types of floods on the red planet were much more common than previously thought and were an important geographical process. The study results provide scientists new insights into river formation on Mars and how it differed from the usually slow and gradual process on Earth. In fact, the breach floods eroded more than enough sediment to completely fill Lake Superior and Lake Ontario.Īlthough flood evidence has been observed previously on Mars, this is the first time that scientists have quantified how widespread it was, particularly during the planet’s early history. Landscapes and other geological features were rapidly reshaped in a matter of days or weeks. The impact on the planet was powerful and almost immediate. “What ends up happening is that all these rivers are just flowing and then fill up and then they overflow and make these catastrophic floods.” “Mars, like the moon, is completely filled with lots and lots of craters, so you have this landscape that’s kind of like a golf ball that’s just full of little holes,” said Stucky de Quay. It appears the ensuing floods loosed immense amounts of water, along with sediment. Scientists analyzed satellite images and sophisticated topographical mapping of these dried-up water basins on Mars to determine what happened when the lakes that used to fill the planet’s giant craters overflowed, likely due to immense rainstorms. Large river systems covered about 50 percent of the planet during this time, and large crater lakes that could hold up to a small ocean’s worth of water were common. Years of evidence show that Mars had streams, ponds, lakes, and maybe even seas and oceans around 4 billion years ago. The project team includes Harvard postdoctoral research fellow Gaia Stucky de Quay from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and scientists from the University of Texas at Austin. This study builds on previous work looking at the planet’s water systems and was published late last year in Nature. New research finds that billions of years ago Mars was beset by catastrophic river flooding that played a massive role in shaping what the planet’s expansive but now dry network of valleys looks like today, with its deep chasms and canyons. You wouldn’t know it to look at Mars now, but rushing waters that crested banks had a hand in sculpting the face of the bone-dry red planet.
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