Our piffling red neighbor may be a bouldery crimson wasteland now , but wads of people believe it was once an ocean - covered humankind just like our own . After scientist found someevidenceof flow water back in 2015 , folks start to take these claims even more seriously . Heck , maybe Mars even supported living .
https://gizmodo.com/nasa-says-theres-strong-evidence-of-liquid-water-on-mar-1733357660
A team of American researchers have a guesstimate for the next ordered query : Okay , if there was water , how much was there ? Oceans ? lake ? Puddles ?
Their estimate : 686 quadrillion meters cubed ( that ’s one follow by 15 zero ) of the stuff and nonsense . If that seems meaningless , it ’s around twice the volume of theAtlantic Ocean , or half thetotal volumeof all the Earth ’s ocean .
The research worker did n’t just pick any old number . Mars is covered withvalley networkscarved into highlands that , on first feeling , just scream “ water did this . ” The investigator work up a new kind of model that look at the depth of each vale based on their color , and calculated just how much water would be required to have created those feature of speech . They also approximate how bountiful an sea would have to have been , with what sort of climate , so as to have a water system cycle able of forming rivers that debilitate into oceans . They published theirestimatesin the daybook Nature Communications today .
The researchers point out that , well , there ’s really no way to recite if they ’re right , nor will there ever be . But they do say their estimates seem to confirm what others have arrived at via dissimilar methods of cipher volumes .
Researcher Tanya Harrison was skeptical of this study ’s results , and others that have try out to model Mars ’ ocean . “ My primary issue with most of these modelling character of papers dealing with Mars ’ Ocean is that we do n’t see strong morphologic evidence to support the former presence of an sea , ” she told Gizmodo in a cellular telephone phone photo of an e-mail surrender via a Twitter lineal substance . fundamentally , yes , the valley look like they were carved by water . But images taken by theMars Global Surveyorof the Northern Lowlands — the place where the sea should have been — don’t reveal evidence that they were under an sea . And where are the shorelines ?
Harrison pointed did signal out that one of the papers the researchers cite show some evidence for water in the Northern Lowlands , but not at the same bulk they estimated in their paper .
So , just how wet was Mars , really ? Who knows , it ’s dry now . The solar winds have since denude Mars of its atmosphere and soon the eternal sleep ofits water . But maybe we’llend upthere and line up fogey . Maybe we wo n’t .
MarsScienceWater
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