Valleys on Red Planet may be due to glaciers
Print Edition
The question of whether ancient life could have existed on Mars centers on the water that once flowed there, but new research published suggests that many of the Red Planet’s valleys were gouged by icy glaciers instead of rivers.
The study in Nature Geoscience, which comes amid a flurry of new Mars missions trying to discover if the now-barren planet ever hosted life, casts doubt on a dominant theory that the planet once had a warm, wet climate with abundant liquid water that sculpted the landscape.
Researchers from Canada and the United States examined more than 10,000 Martian valleys and compared them to channels on Earth that were carved under glaciers.
“For the last 40 years, since Mars’s valleys were first discovered, the assumption was that rivers once flowed on Mars, eroding and originating all of these valleys,” said lead author Anna Grau Galofre in a statement released by the University of British Columbia.
But these formations come in a huge variety “suggesting that many processes were at play to carve them.”
Researchers found similarities between some Martian valleys and the sub-glacial channels of Devon Island, in the Canadian Arctic, which has been nicknamed “Mars on Earth” for its barren, freezing conditions and which hosted NASA space training missions.
The study authors said their findings suggest that some Martian valleys could have been formed about 3.8 billion years ago by meltwater beneath ice sheets.
They said that would align with climate modeling predicting that the planet would have been much cooler in its ancient past.
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