Catastrophic flooding on Mars has carved out some of the deepest valleys on the planet

Mars is one of the smallest planets in our solar system, but it’s also home to some of the largest, deepest, and most spectacular canyon and valley systems ever spied on by human (or robotic) eyes. New research suggests that many of these Martian features were shaped by catastrophic weather events of the kind that are now becoming a greater threat here on Earth.

“We have found that at least a quarter of the total eroded volume of the Martian valley networks has been carved out by the flooding of the lakes,” said Alexander Morgan, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute (PSI), in a statement.

Morgan is co-author of an article published Thursday in the journal Nature which explains how the ancient lakes of the Red Planet became swollen enough to protrude from their edges. The resulting massive flooding has carved deep canyons and valleys into the surface of the planet.

“It has been known for some time that a few selected Martian valleys have formed as a result of lake overflow flooding, but our study is the first global analysis,” Morgan said.

Morgan and his colleagues applied algorithms to global maps of Mars to calculate the total eroded volume of valleys formed by flooding from the lake breaches.

“Our results show that many Martian valleys are in fact more analogous to catastrophic flooding on Earth, such as the ones that shaped the northwestern United States at the end of the last Ice Age,” Morgan explains.

Some of the deep canyons and valleys of the Himalayas and Rocky Mountains formed when glaciers melted over 15,000 years ago and the lakes below overflowed their shores.

On both Mars and Earth, the catastrophic floods that changed the landscape were caused by global warming. Mars would eventually lose most of its atmosphere and surface water. Here on Earth, the climate has experienced accelerated warming in recent times thanks to man-made climate change.

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Researchers are not digging deep into the link between ancient Mars and contemporary global warming on Earth, but on this planet today glacial lake raging floods (GLOF) closely resemble the forces that shaped ancient Mars and prehistoric Earth, albeit on a smaller scale.

The above video from PSI takes a bit of a look at the difference between ancient flooding on Mars, which was caused by the rupturing of impact crater walls turned into lake shores, and the rupture of glacial moraines on Earth.

“The science behind the devastation they unleash is the same,” says PSI.

In today’s Andes and Himalayas, increased glacial melting causes lakes to swell, increasing the risk of explosive flooding. The concern over these floods is not so much how they may reshape the landscape, but rather the destructive threat they pose to life and property in the fertile and populated valleys below.

Climate change on Earth will not carve out new canyons comparable to the Grand Canyon as it did on ancient Mars, but learning about the climatic and geological history of our neighboring planet offers another reminder of the power of natural forces that our species is now directly impacting.