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3.4 billion years ago meteors struck Mars, causing tsunamis that changed the shape of a coastline surrounding one of it's oceans. According to researchers, the tsunami's waves would have been as high as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Researchers are see Wochit
File photo of the red planet. The dusty surface of Mars was not always so rocky and barren - billions of years ago, massive tsunamis swept across the surface after space rocks pelted Martian oceans.(Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
Maybe the dust-blown, frozen wastes of Mars aren’t such a bad place after all.
A new study reports evidence that colossal tsunamis once swamped the Red Planet’s northern reaches, inundating an area as big as California, Nevada and Oregon combined. In some spots, the waves rolling inland from an ancient ocean would have measured almost 400 feet high, tall enough to overtop the Capitol dome with plenty of depth to spare.
A witness on Mars would have seen “a huge, red wall of water moving very, very fast,” says study co-author Alexis Rodriguez of the Planetary Science Institute. “It would be pretty surreal.”
In this week’s
Scientific Reports, Rodriguez and his colleagues describe finding the watery fingerprints of two mega-tsunamis, both potentially created by a comet or space rock plunging into the Martian sea. One tsunami swept up boulders, some as big as a tank, and dumped them far inland. The second, millions of years later, left behind long tongues of ice -- perfect places to study the chemistry of the Martian ocean and whether it could have sustained life, the study says.
The tsunamis plowed inland more than 300 miles in some locations, an “enormous” distance by the standards of tsunamis on Earth, the study notes. That huge reach stems from the waves’ mind-blowing size.
Photos of Mars:
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The scientists picked up the tsunamis’ scent by looking at images from a bevy of spacecraft studying the planet. Together the footage suggests that material flowed uphill from the ocean that many scientists think once spread across northern Mars. The only plausible explanation besides a tsunami is wind, and wind wouldn’t push huge boulders up a slope or create flows of ice, the study’s authors reason.
The new findings address an important puzzle about Martian history: if the planet once had an ocean, where’s the beach? Scientists have argued for years about whether there’s a shoreline on Mars where the ocean would have been, says Stephen Clifford of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Some Mars experts have doubted there was an ocean at all.
Rodriguez and his colleagues now say there’s no clear shoreline because tsunamis buried it. The discovery of the tsunami deposits “removes much of the controversy” over whether Mars harbored an ocean early in its history, Rodriguez says.
Tsunamis of this size would’ve arisen when gargantuan space objects slammed into the Martian ocean billions of years ago. But “Marsquakes” or landslides could also have triggered the huge waves, the study says.
The new research make a “pretty strong” case, Clifford says, because the formations on Mars “are very, very difficult to explain by processes … other than a tsunami.” The Martian tsunamis, he says, were far more powerful than the killer wave that took a quarter of a million lives in Indonesia and elsewhere in 2004.
The Martian coastline of billions of years ago, Rodriguez says, “is not a good place to be.”
Mars rover through the years:
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