Crusty,
dusty and rusty describes the Mars of today.
Surface
features of the Red Planet, however, hint at a watery past where torrents of
groundwater carved out deep canyons, formed sweeping fans of sediment and
cemented together huge fault lines.
"Groundwater
probably played a major role in shaping many of the things we see on the Martian
surface," said George Postma, a sedimentologist at UtrechtUniversity in the Netherlands.
Postma
collaborated with Virginia Tech's Erin Kraal and others to recreate Mars'
fan-like sediment deposits with a scale model. The group detailed their findings in a recent
issue of the journal Nature.
A separate
new study by Allan Treiman, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in
Houston, details the role of groundwater in depositing minerals in rocky
Martian crevices.
Rapid
release
Scientists
think a
massive ocean once covered one-third of Mars, and recent photographs
suggest that pockets of water may still be hidden beneath the planet's surface.
Water is crucial for life as we know it, so signs of underground water now —
and more extensive amounts of water in the past — both suggest Mars was or
might still be habitable, at least to microorganisms.
Postma said
such reservoirs of water probably carved out canyons, rapidly depositing
step-like layers of sediment in Martian impact craters across the planet.
"When we examined photographs
of Mars, we saw that some deltas had steps of material," Postma told SPACE.com.
He noted that such formations are seen on Earth only where water rapidly
deposits delta sediment, such as parts of the Sahara Desert's Lake Chad.
"Based
on our models, these structures might have been caused by catastrophic events
that filled the craters in one go," he said. Instead of taking millions of
years to form, Postma said the fans probably formed in decades.
Ancient
torrents of water spilling out of Martian ground with the output of the
Mississippi River, for example, could have formed some of the dozen step-like
sediment fans the researchers observed in about 13 years.
"Another
puzzling feature is that you don't see a drainage network along the crater's
side," Postma said — yet another clue that fans' formations were rapid and
not the product of rainy runoff. "Craters are thought to be very porous,
so the water can sink through. Another possibility is that the water just
evaporated into the Martian atmosphere."
Mineral
cement
In Valles
Marineris, where about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) of 6-mile-deep
(10-kilometers) chasms dwarfing the Grand Canyon stretch over Mars, Treiman
thinks he has located more evidence of groundwater at work.
"Groundwater
is a crucial reservoir in Mars's global water cycle and plays an important role
in ... alteration of bedrock," Treiman writes in his study, detailed
yesterday in the
journal Nature Geoscience.
The Valles
Marineris canyons formed when massive slabs of rock both lifted up and
sunk, creating fault lines in the process. Spacecraft imagery of the landscape
shows the crevices as ridges, which Treiman thinks were filled with
mineral-rich groundwater between 3.5 billion and 1.8 billion years ago.
"This
interpretation implies that liquid water was stable at or near Mars's surface
when the fault zones were cemented," Treiman said, noting that only a
"warm wet" climate on Mars could have made the deposits possible.
"The
presence of liquid water is important in current ideas of Mars's history,"
Treiman said, "and central to Mars's potential for life."
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