Water melting under glacial ice, and not by free-flowing rivers as previously thought, was what carved the large number of valley networks that cross the surface of Mars.
This is what it suggests a new study from the University of British Columbia (UBC), in Canada, published this Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Martian origins
According to the conclusions of this new study, therefore, at the origins of Mars there were no rivers, rains and oceans. It was not a hot and humid place. According to the main author, Anna Grau Galofre, former PhD student in the department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences:
For the last 40 years, since the valleys of Mars were discovered, it was assumed that rivers once flowed over Mars, eroding and originating all these valleys. But there are hundreds of valleys on Mars, and they are very different from each other. If you look at Earth from a satellite, you see many valleys: some made by rivers, some by glaciers, some by other processes, and each type has a distinctive shape. Mars is similar, as the valleys look very different from each other, suggesting that many processes were at play to carve them.
To reach this conclusion, new techniques have been developed to examine thousands of Martian valleys. They also compared Martian valleys to subglacial channels in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and discovered striking similarities. Total, Researchers analyzed more than 10,000 Martian valleys, using a new algorithm to infer their underlying erosion processes.
The valleys would have been formed ago 3.8 billion of years on a planet that is farther from the sun than Earth, during a time when the sun was less intense.
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The news
Mars was originally covered in ice sheets.
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.