The Red Planet used to have rivers and lakes flowing through it. It has been difficult to show that full blown oceans were once a part of that picture.
Researchers from Pennsylvania State University have mapped the surface of Mars and they think they have found the best evidence to date of ancient oceans on the red planet.
According to a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets, the shoreline is 3.5 billion years old. They note that the accretion around 3,000 feet thick is consistent with ocean shorelineAccumulation.
Benjamin Cardenas, an assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State, is one of the authors of the study. The idea is that you can measure the changes on Earth by understanding how the silt piles up. That's what we did here, but it's Mars.
"mundane" geology and "textbook geology" were used to accomplish this. His team fed the data from NASA and the US Geological Survey into the software.
They discovered and mapped out over 4,000 miles of ridges from ancient rivers. They decided that they weren't just the markings of a river, but the remnants of an ancient shoreline, by grouping them into 20 systems. The researchers think that they make a compelling case with the combination of the two.
Maybe there were once aliens on Mars.
The existence of an ocean of this size means a higher potential for life.
That is a huge leap. We can't fault them for being excited. It would raise the odds if there was an ocean on Mars.
The meteorite hit Mars so hard that NASA thought it was a big earthquake.
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