Mars was once a wet world. The geological record of the Red Planet shows evidence for water flowing on the surface – from river deltas to valleys carved by massive flash floods.
Mars was once a wet world. The geological record of the Red Planet shows evidence for water flowing on the surface – from river deltas to valleys carved by massive flash floods.
But a new study shows that no matter how much rainfall fell on the surface of ancient Mars, very little of it seeped into an aquifer in the planet’s southern highlands.
A graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin made the discovery by modeling groundwater recharge dynamics for the aquifer using a range of methods – from computer models to simple back-of-the-envelope calculations.
No matter the degree of complexity, the results converged on the same answer – a miniscule .03 millimeters of groundwater recharge per year on average. That means that wherever rain fell in the model, only an average of .03 millimeters per year could have entered the aquifer and still produced the landforms remaining on the planet today.
Read more at University of Texas at Austin
Photo Credit: WikiImages via Pixabay
