New Discovery Provides New Evidence That Water Once Flowed On Mars
Scientists identified signs even in areas they previously thought were always dry.
Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS via Getty Images
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Subscribe for free to get more stories like this directly to your inboxIt’s the most essential component of sustaining life on our planet, but we’ve yet to find concrete proof that water has ever flowed freely elsewhere in our cosmic neighborhood.
As NASA continues to explore Mars with its Curiosity rover, however, we seem to be finding more evidence supporting the theory that the red planet was once home to a significant supply of H2O.
“Ancient water ripples”
Although you wouldn’t be able to grab a glass of water upon landing on Mars, the features of certain rocks observed by the rover indicate that you probably could have once upon a time.
The team behind the Curiosity project says that the rippled texture of these rocks belies the previous notion that water reservoirs didn’t exist in that region of the planet.
“We climbed through thousands of feet of lake deposits and never saw evidence like this,” said NASA scientist Ashwin Vasavada. “And now we found it in a place we expected to be dry.”
Mysteries of the ‘marker band’
Water on Mars probably evaporated billions of years ago, but there are telltale signs that it once flowed across much of the planet. For starters, the rippled rock formations seem to reveal that sediment was washed around by the waves of a shallow lake.
Another impactful feature uncovered by Curiosity is known as the “Marker Band” near one prominent Martian mountain. This clear barrier is defined by darker rocks that could provide evidence of precipitation on the planet’s surface.
Thus far, the rover hasn’t been able to remove a sample from the especially hard rock, but its distinctive features show that something unusual happened there.
Finally, there’s the Gediz Vallis, a valley near the same mountain that experts say could have been formed by a river that flowed through the region.
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