Every cubic foot of Martian soil contains two pints of water, and groundwater may still flow deep underground. The planet's southern ice cap alone contains enough frozen water to cover the entire surface of Mars. Moreover, the vast Martian water reserves could not disappear entirely. Such life had plenty of time to evolve in the Martian ocean, as it developed in ours. Water is an essential ingredient for life as we know it. The sad history of the Martian environment has consequences for humans today. Their article has received major media attention, and, as of this writing, is on the front page of CNN. Now, planetary scientist Geronimo Villanueva and a team of researchers have published an article in the journal Sciencethat provides compelling new evidence for a vast, long-lived Martian ocean. Scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder also mapped river deltas on the Martian service that apparently fed into vanished oceans. The European Space Agency’s “Mars Express” orbiter, for instance, detected probable ocean floor sediments in regions ringed by ancient Martian shorelines. In recent years, radar and visual maps provided by orbiting space probes have strongly supported the existence of an ocean, billions of years ago. However, recent breakthroughs in scientific understandings of Mars’s watery past suggest that climate history can, and should, expand into the Solar System.įor more than two decades, the presence of an ancient Martian ocean has been a source of academic controversy. Others are too concerned with contextualizing global warming to consider environments beyond Earth. Many examine how climate change affected human beings in centuries when space travel could scarcely be imagined. Until now, their research has investigated environmental changes on Earth, and with good reason. Climate historians explore how climate change influenced human history.
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