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At present, most of the water on Mars is firmly hidden in its ice caps, but it was once abundant on this planet. New research suggests that overflowing lakes may have carved the dramatic canyons of the planet.
As Phys.org According to the report, billions of years ago, water would once have flowed through enormous rivers on Mars that would have emptied into craters that would become vast seas and vast lakes.
New research conducted by the University of Texas at Austin shows that these crater lakes are sometimes so full of water that their swollen lakes eventually overflow their basins, which would have caused floods of sufficient magnitude to end create the canyons of the planet. In fact, it is even thought that some of these floods on Mars would have been of such intensity that canyons would have formed in just a few weeks.
The lead author of the new study, Tim Goudge, a postdoctoral researcher at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences, explained that his new research reveals that geological activities such as flooding may have had a much greater impact than tectonic plates. now see on Mars today.
"These pierced lakes are quite common and some of them are quite large, others of the size of the Caspian Sea. We therefore believe that this type of catastrophic overflow flooding and rapid incision of exit canyons was probably very important on the surface of early Mars. "
Overflowing crater lakes carved canyons on Mars @utaustin https://t.co/diDcwZtLTS
– Phys.org (@physorg_com) November 16, 2018
Scientists already know that many craters on Mars have been filled with water and turned into paleolakes. More than 200 of these paleolakes have been spotted next to exit canyons that sometimes extend for hundreds of kilometers, but previously scientists were not able to determine whether these canyons were forming rapidly or over long periods, which could have lasted millions of years.
By examining photographs from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite, the researchers carefully analyzed the topography of 24 paleolakes, the crater rims and their exit holes, and highlighted floods. In fact, one of the paleolakes studied was the Jezero crater, which is currently considered a possible landing place for the March 2020 lander.
As Goudge notes, "This tells us that the differences between the planets are not as important as the basic physics of the overflow process and the size of the basin. You can learn more about this process by comparing different planets instead of just thinking about what's happening on Earth or what's happening on Mars. "
The new study that describes how the canyons of Mars were probably formed by overflowing lakes was published in Geology.
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