NASA's Curiosity Mars rover discovers evidence of ripples from an ancient Red Planet lake (images)

[Admin]

Rippled textures in a shallow lake bed on Mars indicate that ice-free liquid water once pooled here.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover discovers evidence of ripples from an ancient Red Planet lake (images) : Read more

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

Interesting, as they see individual extended periods of waves in about 100 m of wind deposited strata, suggesting a long period of ice free water and they note that while this is seen they don't see evidence of glacial processes. According to "THE SEDIMENTARY HISTORY OF MARS AS OBSERVED BY ROVERS" from 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 2019 Curiosity had then observed about 00 m of deposit that implied about 10 million year periods of streams and lakes.

A huge question is of course what the climate was between Mars formation about 4.5 billion years ago and these 3.7 billion year old formations. A recent paper suggests that there could have been these 10 million on-and-off ice free water periods the whole time (until Mars ran out of dense atmosphere), explaining the absence of carbonates. Hopefully, if life took early on it retreated to the subsurface crust:
- January 30, 2025 by Evan Gough

How Hydrogen Kept Early Mars Warm

Universe Today