Cohen, Moreland win Earth and Planetary Sciences awards | The Source | Washington University in St Louis wustl.edu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wustl.edu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Oceans’ worth of ancient water may have been locked up in minerals in Mars's crust, increasing estimates for the total amount of that once flowed on the red planet.
March 16, 2021 at 11:00 am
An ocean’s worth of water may be lurking in minerals below Mars’ surface, which could help explain why the Red Planet dried up.
Once home to lakes and rivers, Mars is now a frigid desert (
SN: 11/12/20). But measurements of atmospheric water loss made by spacecraft like NASA’s MAVEN orbiter are not enough to account for all of Mars’ missing water which was once so abundant it could have covered the whole planet in a sea up to 1,500 meters deep. That’s more than half the volume of the Atlantic Ocean.
Science.
The finding “helps bring focus to a really important mechanism for water loss on Mars,” says Kirsten Siebach, a planetary geologist at Rice University in Houston who was not involved in the work. “Water getting locked up in crustal minerals may be equally important as water loss to space and could potentially be more important.”