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Mars is home to the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons, and volcanic activity has had a profound impact on how the planet is as it is today. Now, new evidence shows that the volcanic eruptions on ancient Mars were incredibly dramatic, with thousands of “super eruptions” projecting huge amounts of dust and gas into the air and blocking the sun.
Beginning around 4 billion years ago, volcanic activity on Mars reached a period of around 500 million years when super eruptions spewed out water vapor, carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide. toxic sulfur in the atmosphere. These eruptions spread a thick layer of ash thousands of miles around the volcanoes and, according to NASA, threw up the equivalent of 400 million Olympic pools of molten rock and gas.
There was so much of this activity that it changed the climate of the entire planet, according to the study’s lead author Patrick Whelley, a geologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Each of these eruptions would have had a significant climate impact – perhaps the gas released made the atmosphere thicker or blocked the sun and made the atmosphere cooler,” Whelley said in a statement. “Martian climate modelers will have work to do in trying to understand the impact of volcanoes.”
Whelley and his colleagues were studying large basins on the Martian surface that were originally believed to be from asteroid impacts. But more recently, researchers realized that the craters could actually be the sites of ancient volcanoes that had collapsed on their own.
“We read this document and were interested in the follow-up, but instead of looking for the volcanoes themselves, we looked for the ash because you can’t hide this evidence,” Whelley said.
They investigated an area called Arabia Terra and researched how volcanic minerals were distributed across the surface using Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s compact reconnaissance imaging spectrometer for Mars. They found these volcanic minerals even thousands of miles away from the craters and used 3D topographic maps to see that the ash had been deposited in cohesive layers, suggesting it had settled around the same time. Not only that, but the layers were so thick that ashes must have been created from thousands of super eruptions.
Currently, the Arabia Terra region is the only place on Mars where evidence of these massive explosive volcanic eruptions has been found, making it a special place on the planet.
“People are going to read our newspaper and say ‘How? How could Mars do this? How can such a small planet melt enough rock to fuel thousands of super eruptions in one place? Said co-author Jacob Richardson. “I hope these questions lead to a lot of further research.”
The research is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
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