Mars would not always have been this arid and inhospitable planet. In any case, this is what a team of researchers tends to show in a study published Thursday, November 7 in the journal Nature. According to the analysis of data collected by the Chinese rover Zhurong, the Tianwen 1 space probe and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe, the Red Planet was once home to a vast ocean. Its ancient coastline would also have been correctly identified.
Significant traces
To achieve these results, the Zhurong rover explored, since its landing in 2021, a plain called Utopia Planitia which is located in the northern hemisphere of Mars. Evidence of ancient water had already been spotted there. The new observations would confirm the presence of hollows, sedimentation channels and mud volcanoes, which are all formations found in areas where there was water and ice, Reuters points out.
Even more, the data suggests that a coastline once stood there. In detail, according to researchers’ estimates, the ocean was created by floods 3.68 billion years ago, perhaps at a time when our neighbor had already cooled and dried up and had lost much of its atmosphere. The body of water would have ended up freezing, forming the suggested coastline, before disappearing 3.42 billion years ago. We “do not claim that our results definitively prove the existence of an ocean on Mars,” however, tempered Bo Wu of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, lead author of the study.
Results debated
These new analyzes therefore seem to provide additional evidence about the possibility of a Martian ocean, and even provide a probable evolution scenario. However, the team’s results were not unanimous among the scientific community. Benjamin Cardenas, from Pennsylvania State University (USA), for example, said he was “skeptical”, believing that Martian winds have destroyed all traces of a potential coastline. For Bo Wu, these could nevertheless be rocks excavated more recently following a meteorite fall, indicates the Phys.org site.
Still, these results continue to fuel the debate around the potential existence of a Martian ocean, which still remains a great uncertainty today. Several missions are seeking to bring back Martian rocks to study them from this angle, or to identify where the water from this possible ocean may have passed. At the key to this mystery is the prospect that Mars could, once upon a time, have supported life, with water being considered one of its key ingredients.
