early Mars tagged posts

New Research Points to Possible Seasonal Climate Patterns on Early Mars

Research suggests seasonal climate patterns on early mars
Patterns in mud cracks show that Mars may have had cyclical moisture patterns. Left: the terrain in the Gale Crater where Curiosity is currently exploring. Right: mud cracks on Earth, where wet-dry cycling has occurred, creating Y-shaped patterns. Credit: Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06220-3

Scientists aren’t entirely sure how life began on Earth, but one prevailing theory posits that persistent cycles of wet and dry conditions on land helped assemble the complex chemical building blocks necessary for microbial life. This is why a patchwork of well-preserved ancient mud cracks found by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is so exciting to the mission’s team.

A new paper in Nature details how the distinctive hexagonal pattern of these mud cracks offers the first evidence of wet-d...

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Early Mars was covered in ice sheets, not flowing rivers, researchers say

UBC researchers have concluded that early Martian landscape probably looked similar to this image of the Devon ice cap. Credit: Anna Grau Galofre.

A large number of the valley networks scarring Mars’s surface were carved by water melting beneath glacial ice, not by free-flowing rivers as previously thought, according to new UBC research published today in Nature Geoscience. The findings effectively throw cold water on the dominant “warm and wet ancient Mars” hypothesis, which postulates that rivers, rainfall and oceans once existed on the red planet.

To reach this conclusion, lead author Anna Grau Galofre, former PhD student in the department of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences, developed and used new techniques to examine thousands of Martian valleys...

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