3-D Reconstruction Of Martian Surface Uncovers Lost Evidence Of Ancient Floods

Mars has been cold and dry for half its life, but as recently as 500 million years ago, its surface was shaped by water.

By Rebecca Boyle Posted 03.07.2013 at 3:00 pm 12 Comments

Ancient Floodwaters on Mars The location of the ~1000 km Marte Vallis channel system on Mars. Marte Vallis is filled with young lavas obscuring the source and morphology of the channels. The dashed box highlights the area shown in the image at the bottom of the page. Courtesy of NASA/MOLA Team/Smithsonian Institution

A new 3-D model of ancient Mars depicts how ancient mega-floods carved channels into the planet within the last 500 million years. While Curiosity roves across Gale Crater in search of other watery evidence, this new map will help scientists trying to understand how water shaped the planet earlier in its life.

Mars has several channels embedded in its surface, which were carved by ancient gigantic floods larger than anything known to have happened on Earth. The flood channels are distinct from alluvial fans and other drainage areas, like the one Curiosity is exploring in Gale Crater--they’re much larger, and must be the result of some catastrophically huge displacement of water. It could be from some underground reservoir that was loosed either by volcanic activity, or maybe an impact. Some of the evidence of these floods has been erased, however, including a region near the Martian equator called Elysium Planitia.

Marte Vallis 3-D Reconstruction : 3D visualization of the buried Marte Vallis channels beneath the Martian surface. Marte Vallis consists of multiple perched channels formed around streamlined islands. These channels feed a deeper and wider main channel. The surface has been elevated, and scaled by a factor of 1/100 for clarity. The color scale represents the elevation of the buried channels relative to a Martian datum. Smithsonian Institution/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Sapienza University of Rome/MOLA Team/USGS

Lava plains cover Elysium Planitia, burying evidence of its older geologic past. Among the buried evidence is the source of the flood channel called Marte Vallis, which extends about 620 miles across the Elysium plain and 60-odd miles wide. Marte Vallis is an important flood channel in part because it’s so big, and in part because it’s so young, especially compared to other flood channels that are more well-studied. Understanding Marte Vallis will help scientists understand Mars’ recent hydrologic history, which is especially important because when this flood channel was carved, the planet was cold and dry. But to study it, scientists have to peel back the lava layers.

They did it using the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) sounding instrument and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Radar images helped scientists reveal erosion in buried Martian bedrock, and they realized the erosion was far more pronounced than anyone thought. The channel is at least twice as deep as earlier research suggested, according to the research team, which includes scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Planetary Science Directorate in the Southwest Research Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution.

The team was also able to map these buried channels and figure out where they came from. The great Elysium flood originated from a fracture system known as Cerberus Fossae, the radar showed. This means the floodwaters probably came from a deep aquifer, which breached because of tectonic activity.

Its deepest part compares to the largest-known megaflood on Earth, the Missoula floods, which carved out much of the western United States, the researchers say.

“This work demonstrates the importance of orbital sounding radar in understanding how water has shaped the surface of Mars,” said Gareth A. Morgan, a Smithsonian scientist who led the work. Their paper is published this week in Science.

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12 Comments

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Bagpipes100

03/07/13 at 4:16 pm

"ancient gigantic floods larger than anything known to have happened on Earth. "

I can name one that was bigger and on earth.

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mtmerrick

03/07/13 at 4:34 pm

Sorry bagpipes, myths & legends don't count.

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Bagpipes100

03/07/13 at 5:06 pm

@mtmerrick

I take it you're a Darwin Thumping Fundamentalist? You do know there is something called the scientific method right? It works well for science, but not telling us what happened in the past.

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JRS ONE

03/07/13 at 6:41 pm

Relax Bagpipe. I'm sure martians had their own flood-centric creation myths.

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Mayan

03/07/13 at 7:58 pm

We knew about floods before on Mars, forgot about it and recently discovered this knowledge, really!?

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pioneer10

03/07/13 at 10:55 pm

Whatever it takes to spark interest in subterranean Mars and get to exploring it! I'm sure what we see on the surface pales in comparison to the world beneath the rust...

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killerT

03/08/13 at 9:10 am

lol Mars now has a "hydrologic history"
So cool that we can say that now.

@Bagpipes100 Im guessing the bigger flood on Earth you refer to is the one they washed your brain with maybe?

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Bagpipes100

03/08/13 at 9:20 am

So let me get this straight,

A historical event recorded by many cultures world wide is a myth......but a theory of life forming from non-life (and by theory I mean wild conjecture that hasn't had any observations to back it up to date) on a planet which by the same understanding should have been frozen over is true... riiiight.

Let's deal with the facts. The global flood recorded is consistent with the observations we can make here and now, we see what we should expect to see if it did occur.

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AnyIcon

03/08/13 at 3:08 pm

Bagpipes100,
There was no flood. There was a temporary sinking of land.
This is why the old myths are considered wrong, sir.
And whatever science should do, it should not pay attention to random cultures around the world, with random religions recording the same event, independently in their history, lol. ;)

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MrTrav231

03/10/13 at 2:29 pm

@Bagpipes

The ancients also had no fuckin clue there was an entire world to be found. Noahs "storm" could have affected a large area, that, to the naive people was the whole world. So take your babble to a religious magazines site, not this one.

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MrTrav231

03/10/13 at 2:32 pm

And, how the hell do pick truths from fiction in the religions that claim to have all these parallels of events that dictate creation, destruction, etc?

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thumbpick

03/11/13 at 11:18 am

"largest-known megaflood on Earth, the Missoula floods"

What about the megaflood when the Straights of Gibraltar gave way, and the ocean waters flooded the Mediterranean Sea valley? That had to have been spectacular.

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