• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Fossils Of Mars’ Climate Show A Different World 2 Billion Years Ago

September 26, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

We know that Mars was different in the past. Flowing water, abundant ice, and a denser atmosphere were the main features of the ancient Red Planet. All of that is gone, but the evidence remains. Planetary scientists have conducted an in-depth analysis of the various terrains present on Mars and found fossilized evidence of the landscape of the past.

Advertisement

They are calling them paleo-bedforms. The rippling of dunes by the wind, the action of glaciers, the flow of rivers, and waves on lakes have been seen by rovers and documented from orbit. A project over a decade in the making has delivered a global survey of the paleo-bedforms, showing evidence of the ancient climate across Mars, carved by wind or water.

The team used images from the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They found paleo-dunes and paleo-megaripples carved by wind into the Martian sand. They also found fluvial paleo-dunes shaped by water, and dune cast pits – paleo-dunes so eroded that only a shallow depression is left behind.

“The most compelling and unambiguous paleo-bedforms were the dunes,” lead author Matthew Chojnacki, from the Planetary Science Institute, said in a statement. “A lot of these paleo-dunes are dead ringers for the modern dunes, they just look more decrepit.”

How does the effect of wind and water become fossilized? In the former case, the team believe that the wind shapes the sand, and as the wind drops it hardens slowly into rock. This could be helped by it getting buried in lava or ash from ancient volcanic eruptions. The fluvial ones are harder to come by and have been found only in the context of ancient megafloods, which was surprising.

“Mars has an abundance of dry river channels where more fluvial bedforms may have formed, but it appears their small size and channel infilling were not conducive for their preservation,” Chojnacki said.

Advertisement

Most of the paleo-bedforms are about 2 billion years old or from more recent times. They were either buried and slow erosion has revealed them again, or they were never buried at all. They are found all over the planet, including in famous regions such as Valles Marineris, Noctis Labyrinthus, and Hellas Planitia.

“While many bedforms on Mars are active and migrating today, other fields are static and show evidence for some sort of stabilization process that may eventually lead to lithification,” Chojnacki said. “Understanding this continuum will hopefully allow us to better understand the changing climatic conditions of the red planet.” 

The study is published in the journal Geomorphology.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Hong Kong security chief steps up pressure on city’s main press group
  2. One Identity has acquired OneLogin, a rival to Okta and Ping in sign-on and identity access management
  3. “Starquakes” On Neutron Stars Could Be Source Of Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts
  4. The Smallest Mammal In The World Lived 53 Million Years Ago

Source Link: Fossils Of Mars’ Climate Show A Different World 2 Billion Years Ago

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Get Ready, Skywatchers: A “Dazzling” Total Lunar Eclipse Is Coming In 2025
  • How A Man Won The Lottery 14 Times Using Unbelievably Basic Math
  • What Are The Amazon’s “Flying Rivers”? And Why Every Single One Of Us Relies On Them
  • Curious New Microbe With Tiny Genome Toes The Line Between Cell And Virus
  • We’ve Just Found Out Where The World’s Longest-Living Vertebrate Has Its Babies
  • For The First Time, An Animal Has Been Shown Responding To Plant-Produced Sounds
  • Deep Ocean Currents Have “Weather” And Seasonal Changes That We’re Only Just Learning About
  • Stratus: What Are The Symptoms Of The Latest COVID-19 Subvariant To Spread Around The World?
  • In 1927, Henry Ford Tried To Build A Town In The Amazon And Things Went Very, Very Badly
  • Human Botfly: Say Hello To The Parasite That Would Love To Get Under Your Skin
  • Is The Weather Making Your Headache Worse?
  • “Zoning Out” Actually Helps You Learn? Data From Up To 90,000 Brain Cells Says So
  • Over Past 250,000 Years, Three Major Waves Of Human-Neanderthal Interbreeding Have Been Identified
  • Zebrafish “Catch” Yawns Just Like Us – We Might Need To Rethink Evolution To Account For That
  • 80,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Footprints Reveal How Children Hunted On Beaches
  • 5 Animals That Have Absolutely No Business Jumping (In Our Very Humble, Definitely Unbiased Opinion)
  • Polar Vortex Patterns Explain Winter Cold Snaps Against Background Warming Trend
  • Scientists Tracked An Olm For 2,569 Days And It Did Not Move An Inch
  • Look Out For “Fireballs”: The Best Meteor Shower Of 2025 Is About To Commence, According To NASA
  • Why Do Many Large Language Models Give The Same Answer To This “Random” Number Query?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version