Signs of seasonal drying up of water found on Mars
Miscellaneous / / August 10, 2023
The climate changed from hot to cool, just like on Earth.
Now Mars is a dry and barren wasteland, but it wasn't always like that. There is new evidence that the planet's climatic conditions changed, probably seasonally, and this could well have contributed to the emergence of life. This is stated in the new researchpublished in the journal Nature.
This theory was confirmed by new images from the Curiosity rover. They show a network of irregular hexagons in Gale Crater, which could have been formed by regular wetting and drying of the soil.
Scientists note that such patterns usually hint at the seasonality of the climate - cycles of wet and dry conditions under which minerals have time to dry out, creating specific formations in sedimentary rocks. On Mars, they are rich in calcium and magnesium salts, which are approximately 3.6–3.8 billion years old.
We observe centimeter-long polygonal ridges with elevated sulfate content, connected in Y-shaped cells, which fix cracks formed in fresh sludge as a result of repeated cycles of wet and dry conditions of regular intensity.
Instead of sporadic hydrological activity driven by impacts or volcanoes, these results point to a stable, cyclical, possibly seasonal climate on early Mars.
scientists led by geochemist William Rapin
Paul Sabatier University in France
These findings add weight to the body of evidence that conditions on early Mars contributed to the emergence of biochemistry, the molecular basis of life.
And because the surface of Mars has not been updated by tectonic activity, it has a fairly extensive geological record of history going back 4.3 billion years.
The salts in the patterned rock also have a much higher concentration than the host rock, which suggests that they were deposited there when salt water penetrated the mud and then evaporated. And the thickness of the patterned rock suggests that regular wet-dry conditions persisted on Mars for a long time - from thousands to possibly millions of years.
Researchers don't yet have evidence of microbial life on Mars, but these cyclical conditions would be favorable for organizing organic molecules into complex compounds, the authors added research.
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Cover: ESO/M. Kornmesser