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How Violent Floods Made Mars' Surface What It Is Today
A new NASA-funded study has revealed that that bursts of violent floods that moved huge amounts of surface material played a key role in shaping the Martian topography, especially the deep canyons, craters, and valleys on the Red Planet’s surface. Just like Earth, flowing water created some signature surface patterns on the neighboring planet caused by the overflow of surface water, with the results being easily discernible if the event was catastrophic. Studies conducted over the past couple of decades have actually predicted scenarios like ‘megafloods’ happening on the Martian soil due to multiple triggers, with one of them being an asteroid impact.
In fact, astrobiologists have raised the question of whether the water-rich terrain of Mars was once suitable for life, drawing parallels with a similar origin of life concept on Earth. Mars may appear dry and arid in photos, but long swathes of ground extending hundreds of kilometers and usually a kilometer wide are clearly visible and are thought to have been created due to sudden and huge floods. These land structures are called outflow channels, and their sheer size is an indicator of the scale and strength of floods that the planet was witnessed. But so far, the science community has believed that the valleys and canyons on the planet mostly originated due to erosion by long-lived rivers.
Now, a new study that has been published in the Nature journal claims that the massive, short-burst floods changed the planet’s surface more dramatically than previously thought. The paper mentions that lake breach flooding eroded as much as 24 percent of the incised valley volume on early Mars and shaped up a vast majority of Martian valley systems. In fact, these super floods transported enough sediments to fill Lake Superior and Lake Ontario — two of the largest lakes on Earth — in a matter of few weeks. Scientists are now planning to create a lake breach flood model to study the impact of these violent episodes in shaping up what Mars looks like today.
The Current Calm Mars Has A History Of Violent Floods
This is the first study to collectively analyze over 200 breached lakes on Mars and their combined effect on a planetary scale. Based on the surface data collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover, scientists put the Martian valleys into two groups — those that were formed due to gradual erosion, and those that came into existence when water overflowed from craters and led to breach floods. A comparative analysis of the depths, lengths, and volume of these valleys suggests that these breach floods were of extremely high intensity. For example, the average depth of valleys created by breach floods is over twice that of valleys that formed slowly over a long time due to erosion.
The NASA-backed study proposes that the deep canyons of Mars have more to do with these violent floods. And compared to periods on Earth where such changes appear over hundreds and thousands of years, these surface events happened on Mars in merely months or years. The new research challenges the existing models for studying Mars, which happen to be based on how Earth’s surface evolved over millennia. It actually hypothesizes whether catastrophism should serve as the alternative lens for studying the evolutionary history of Mars.
