Mars will soon appear in the oceans

2018-03-19 23:11

Mars will soon appear in the oceans
On the surface of Mars in ancient times there were rivers, lakes and entire oceans.

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The first oceans appeared on Mars about four billion years ago, almost immediately after its formation, 200-300 million years earlier, reports Rus.Media.

“Our colleagues always believed that the plateau of Tharsis, the largest volcanic landforms on Mars, appeared before the oceans were born of Mars some 3.7 billion years ago. We found that the oceans have been or with him, or even sooner,” said Michael Manga, a geologist from the University of California at Berkeley (USA).

In recent years scientists have found many hints that on the surface of Mars in ancient times there were rivers, lakes and entire oceans of water that contained almost the same amount of liquid, like our Arctic ocean. On the other hand, some planetary scientists believe that even in ancient times, Mars could be too cold for the continued existence of the oceans and its water could be in liquid state only during eruptions.

Recent observations of Mars from ground-based telescopes showed that over the past 3.7 billion years, Mars lost an ocean of water, which would be enough to cover the entire surface of the red planet by the ocean with a thickness of 140 meters. Where did this water, scientists are trying to figure out by studying the ancient Martian meteorites.

Manga and his colleagues found that the oceans of Mars were born 200-300 million years earlier than thought scientists studying the structure of the coastline of the alleged ocean of the red planet, which covered most of the Northern hemisphere in the distant past.

Many planetary scientists, according to the Manga, I doubt the very existence of this structure, as part of the bottom of this ocean located in the “wrong” places, where water should be flowing from the bottom up to cover the entire surface. Moreover, other regions were too deep and some too shallow in order to create a single pond General water level.

California geologists have found an explanation for this, analyzing how the formation of the volcanic plateau of Tharsis could affect the birth and evolution of the Martian oceans, as well as drawing attention to one newly opened fact related to this major geological structure of Mars.

Studying this plateau and the adjacent Northern plains, where once was located the ocean of Mars, scientists have noticed that many of the features associated with its coastline looked earlier than the Tharsis and its associated volcanoes. This gave them the idea that this structure was not born before and after the formation of the oceans of Mars.

Following this idea, the scientists compared how the coastline changed these bodies of water with how quickly the growing Tharsis for about half a billion years after its formation. This comparison unexpectedly showed that virtually all the distortions and changes to the shoreline were associated with how deformed the bottom of the ocean under the influence of the growing volcanoes.

Removing these distortions, scientists have discovered that the Arabian plain of Mars, which represents the oldest part of the bottom of its oceans, dates back to the formation Farside, hundreds of millions of years before the alleged time of occurrence of the oceans the red planet.

This Arabian ocean, as shown by their calculations, contained about 3% of the total volume of water than its modern “relative” on the Ground. In other words, he was approximately two times higher than modern Arctic ocean, and contained more water than the polar caps of the Earth. Scientists believe that it became liquid due to the heat, and greenhouse gases that produce volcanoes, including the Tharsis future.

In subsequent periods, the area and volume of this reservoir is constantly changing with the growth Farside, and gave rise to strange features along the coastline of the Northern ocean of Mars, and made it much deeper than it was first. As I hope the scientists, the seismographs of the lander Insight, which will go to Mars in may, to help test their theory.