This photo shows us the bottom of a river as large and mighty as the Mississippi, but on Mars. Every day we discover new things about our neighboring planet.
For a geologist, the rocks speak. And they are telling us a lot about the past of Mars. These photos you are looking at tell stories of wild and mighty riverswhich once traveled the surface of mars.
We have known for years that Mars had waterbut until just a few months ago it was thought to be in contained quantities, and hundreds ago, perhaps billions of years.
In just a couple of weeks, everything has turned upside down. And surely more surprises await us.
Wild rivers and snow on Mars
On May 1, we learned that the Chinese rover Zhurong located some cracks on Mars that showed hints of snow as little as 400,000 years ago.
Today NASA shows the photographs that confirm that in Marte there was not only water, but also wild and mighty rivers with fast currents.
El rover Perseverance landed in Jezero craterprecisely because even from space they could be seen a succession of rocks that had the shape of the bottom of a river. Years later, the rover is analyzing these rocks by traversing their surface.
They are located in what they have called Refugio Skrinklea slope of undulating dunes where, at its highest point, the wind has blown away the sand, exposing the rock:
NASA
To us they are nothing more than rocks, but to a geologist, they are pure gold. The configuration of these stones, which you can see in detail in the opening photo of the news, shows coarse sediment grains and boulders.
That, together with the curved bands of layered rock, are the proofs of a river of fast currents and deep waterswhich dragged a lot of material.
“These data indicate that this is a high-energy river carrying a large amount of debris. The more powerful the water flow, the more easily it is able to move larger chunks of material,” explains Libby Ives, a postdoctoral researcher at JPL NASA, which operates the Perseverance rover.
“The wind has acted like a scalpel, cutting through the top of these reservoirs,” says Caltech’s Michael Lamb, a river specialist and contributor to the Perseverance science team. “We see deposits like this on Earth, but they are never as well exposed as here on Mars. Earth is covered in vegetation that hides these layers.”
“What’s exciting here is that we’ve entered a new phase in the history of Jezero Crater. And it’s the first time we’ve seen environments like this on Mars,” said Perseverance deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan of JPL. “We are thinking about rivers on a different scale than we have before.”
As of now, we know that there were mighty rivers of swift currents on Mars. And there was snow only 400,000 years ago. They are new discoveries the chances of finding life on Mars increaseeven if it is fossilized.
