Mars may have been a prime vacation spot millions of years ago, according to a new study on its coastal deposits.
The data came from China’s Zhurong rover, which landed on the Red Planet on May 14, 2021, and lasted about one year before becoming inoperable. The data from Zhurong, however, suggest Mars once had oceans and beaches similar to those found on Earth, according to a recent study.
The Chinese rover, the country’s first surface venture beyond the Earth’s moon, landed on the southern ridge of Utopia Planitia, a large northern plain that is a candidate for having held oceans of water, and imaged the region with subsurface radar. Looking at the sloping of the sediments, scientists came to the conclusion that Mars once had “onshore sediments [leading] into a large body of water.”
Researchers have long studied the idea of paleo shorelines on Mars, which has a history of “various water-related processes” caused by magma activity, affects, and weathering.
“The structures don’t look like sand dunes,” said Michael Manga, a University of California, Berkeley professor. “They don’t look like an impact crater. They don’t look like lava flows. That’s when we started thinking about oceans.”
The data discovered by the Chinese rover support theories that the Utopia Planitia ridge was once a shoreline that featured Earthlike beaches, Manga said.
“The orientation of these features are parallel to what the old shoreline would have been,” Manga said. “They have both the right orientation and the right slope to support the idea that there was an ocean for a long period of time to accumulate the sand-like beach.”
“The presence of these deposits requires that a good swath of the planet, at least, was hydrologically active for a prolonged period in order to provide this growing shoreline with water, sediment, and potentially nutrients,” said co-author Benjamin Cardenas, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University. “Shorelines are great locations to look for evidence of past life. It’s thought that the earliest life on Earth began at locations like this, near the interface of air and shallow water.”
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The “Mars ocean theory” has long been the topic of discussion among scientists and cartographers due to Mars’s geography, which suggests a large northern ocean once existed on its surface.
Martian oceans would have covered one-third of the planet’s surface, according to the study’s authors.