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Mars it is definitely the most courted planet of the moment. In addition to the proximity and some similarities with Earth, the red planet it is a kind of “mirror of the past” through which we seek answers to the origin of life in our solar system. Billions of years ago, it has been considered that the planet was blue, like ours. Many studies provide evidence that the northern Martian region was home to a large ocean.
Despite this, scientists have never been able to find evidence of this large basin, not even a coastline, a common feature of terrestrial lakes. This mystery may have begun to unravel from a study published in the magazine Nature Scientific Reports, which reaffirms the existence of this ancient ocean and provides a surprising explanation for the lack of geological traces of it: two huge tsunamis totally wiped out the coastlines of the planet.
According to the survey, there are approx. 3 billion years, Mars was punished by two gigantic tsunamis caused by the impact of asteroids with about 30 kilometers in diameter - about 3 times bigger than the meteorite that hit the Yucatan Peninsula and wiped out the dinosaurs. The destruction caused by the impacts of these asteroids, spread sediment across the planet, erasing the evidence coasts or coasts.
The researchers believe they have found evidence of a rare event, since it is It is difficult to find catastrophes of this magnitude even in the most violent phases of Earth's geological history. O impact of the first stellar body formed a crater of 30 kilometers in diameter at the bottom of the ocean Mars. The waves generated by the collision were 120 meters high and spread across more than 250 kilometers from Martian soil.
As evidence of these tsunamis came from soil analysis and thermal imaging of two regions of northeast Mars, the plain chryse and the plateau Arabia Earth (see image above). The two tsunamis happened in one interval of a few million years between one and the other, a period during which the sea level has dropped and the climate has cooled.
The second tsunami left behind large masses of ice called lobes. For future exploratory missions, these glaciers constitute a real time Machine able to reveal the mysteries of the extinct Martian ocean.
