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Storm season
Billions of years ago, Mars may have been buried under powerful and gigantic mega-floods.
In recent years, scientists have discovered evidence of a significant amount of water on and under the surface of Mars. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: research published this month in the Nature newspaper Scientific reports suggests that gigantic “mega-floods” could have deepened the surface features of the red planet and even altered its climate, dramatically changing our understanding of Mars’ past.
Biblical proportions
Scientists at Cornell University and the California Institute of Technology behind the research suspect that the flooding began when a meteor hit Mars about 4 billion years ago.
The impact would have generated enough heat to melt Mars’ ice reservoirs, releasing water vapor into the atmosphere and creating thunderstorm clouds covering the planet, according to a press release from Cornell.
Swept
The end result – which scientists identified using data from NASA’s Curiosity rover – was that flooding shaped the surface of Mars into 30-foot-high ripples of rock and dust. The water itself is long gone – but scientists believe the flooding meant the planet may have been habitable at the time.
“The beginning of Mars was an extremely geologically active planet,” study co-author Alberto Fairén, a visiting astrobiologist at Cornell, said in the statement. “The planet had the necessary conditions to support the presence of liquid water on the surface – and on Earth, where there is water, there is life.”
READ MORE: Field geology at Mars equator indicates ancient mega-flooding [Cornell University]
Learn more about Mars: Scientists just found three more liquid water reservoirs on Mars
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