The climate throughout Mars’ early history has long been debated – was the Red Planet warm and wet, or cold and icy? New research published in Icarus provides evidence for the latter.
The climate throughout Mars’ early history has long been debated – was the Red Planet warm and wet, or cold and icy? New research published in Icarus provides evidence for the latter.
Mars is littered with valley networks, deltas and lake deposits, meaning it must have had freely flowing water at some point, probably around 4 billion years ago. But climate models of the planet’s deep past haven’t been able to produce warm enough conditions to allow liquid water on the surface.
“There are people trying to model Mars’ ancient climate using the same kind of models we use here on Earth, and they’re having a really hard time doing it. It’s difficult to create a warm ancient Mars because the sun was a lot fainter then. The whole solar system was cooler,” said Briony Horgan, an assistant professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at Purdue University. “While a lot of people are using climate models, we’re coming at this from a unique perspective – what does the volcanic record of Mars tell us?”
Volcanism was abundant throughout Mars’ early history. There are large, broad volcanoes on some of the planet’s widely studied regions, but less is known about a region of low and smooth topography in the southern highlands known as Sisyphi Planum. Here, there are more than 100 flat-topped mounds known as the Sisyphi Montes, which could be volcanic in origin.
Read more at Purdue University
Image: Researchers expect the volcanoes in Mars' Sisyphi Planum region to look similar to subglacial volcanoes on earth, such as Herðubreið in Iceland. (Credit: Purdue University photo/Sheridan Ackiss)
