An illustration shows a hypothetical image of Mars 3.6 billion years ago, when the oceans may have covered nearly half of the planet released on February 24, 2025. The blue area shows the depth of the sea filled to the ancient, now the gone coastline, known as Duteronilos. The Orange Star represents the landing site of the Chinese roamer Zhurong, while the Huang Star is the site of NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which landed a few months before Zhurong. |Photo source: Reuters
The ground-permeable radar data obtained by Zhurong Rover in China reveals evidence on the surface of Mars that looks like a beach on the coastline of the sea that may exist on the northern plains of Mars.
These findings are the latest evidence that there is such a hypothetical ocean called Deuteronilus, about 350 to 4 billion years ago, an era when Mars (now cold and desolate) has a thicker atmosphere and warm climate. According to scientists, liquid water oceans on the surface of Mars may have organisms hidden, just like the original oceans of Earth in the early days.
The rover runs from May 2021 to May 2022 and travels about 1.2 miles (1.9 km) in an area that displays a display of ground features. Its ground-penetrating radar propagates high-frequency radio waves to the ground, reflecting the underground characteristics from the underground characteristics, detecting detections of 80 meters (260 feet) below the surface.
Radar images detected approximately 33-115 feet (10-35 meters) of thick underground material with sand-like properties that tilt in the same direction, tilting at a similar angle to the beach at the bottom of the Earth’s Shanghai to encounter the land. The researchers mapped these structures, spanning three-quarters of a mile (1.2 km) along the rover path.
“The surface of Mars has changed dramatically for more than 3.5 billion years, but by using ground radar, we found direct evidence of coastal sediments that are not visible from the ground,” said Hai Liu, a planetary scientist at Guangzhou University. China’s Astronomy-1 mission, including the rovers.
On Earth, beach sediments of this scale take millions of years to form, which suggests that on Mars, there is a large, long water with a volatility that distributes the sediment in nearby rivers. middle. Highland.
“Beaches were formed through processes similar to the waves and tides on Earth,” said Liu, one of the leaders of the study, published Monday in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences. “Such oceans would be against Mars The climate has profound effects, shaping its landscape and creating environments that may be suitable for life that can emerge and thrive.”
“The coastline is a great place to find evidence in past lives,” said Michael Manga, a planetary scientist and co-author of the University of California, Berkeley. “People think that the earliest life on Earth began in places like this, near the interface between air and shallow water.”
Wanderers explore the southern part of the utopian planitia on a large plain in the northern hemisphere of Mars.
The researchers gave other possible explanations of the detected structure.
“The main part of this work is to test other hypotheses. Wind-blowing dunes are considered, but there are some problems. First, dunes tend to group, and these groups produce characteristic patterns in these sediments,” Pennsylvania geoscientist and Study co-author Benjamin Cardenas said.
“We also considered ancient rivers that exist in certain places near Mars, but we rejected this assumption for similar reasons, based on the patterns we see in sediments. And, you’re not usually in Get such structures in lava flow. The beach is just the best for observations,” Cardenas said.
Earth, Mars and other planets in the solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago. This means that when the Earth’s climate changes dramatically, Ditronilos will disappear for about a billion years in Mars history. Scientists say some water may have been thrown into space, while a large amount of water may still be trapped.
A study published last year based on seismic data obtained by NASA’s robot Insight Lander found that large amounts of liquid water may be located deep in the Martian surface in fractured igneous rocks.
For decades, scientists have used satellite images to track Martian surface features similar to coastlines. However, any such evidence on the surface can be eliminated or distorted by billions of years of wind erosion or other geological processes.
This is not the case with newly discovered structures, which over time are engulfed by materials caused by dust rain, meteorite strikes or volcanoes.
“These are well preserved because they are still buried underground in Mars,” Cardenas said.
publishing – February 25, 2025 at 01:46 pm IST
