Traces of Water on the Surface of Mars Examined

For a while, buying land from Mars was a very popular investment tool. It is obvious that we humans will never leave the planet, which is still unknown whether there is life on it or not. Every day, new research is being done on Mars, which is the planet most likely to have life among other planets in the solar system.

While investigating its vital functions, a lot of evidence that there was water on Mars, perhaps billions of years ago, has been revealed, but this is still not enough for us to understand the full past of Mars. Scientists relayed their latest assumptions about the possible past of Mars.

They tracked the salt on Mars

Researchers have used the salt on the surface of Mars to understand when water has last flowed or stopped flowing on the surface of Mars and to reveal a clearer map of the planet’s past. Many different salts have been detected on the Martian surface, but researchers Ellen Leask and Bethany Ehlmann went after chloride, a compound of sodium chloride, also known as table salt. These are the salts that dissolve most easily in water, meaning that if there is water around, they will dissolve in chloride salts. For this reason, salt deposits on the surface of Mars are there because the last water in that area dries up.

Salt deposits found higher than basins

Researchers learned a lot when they mapped the salt deposits. If the waters on a planet are starting to dry up, you expect the remaining water to collect in basins. However, according to the map the researchers drew, most of the salt deposits were higher than the basins and in narrow areas. This showed that the water flowed into the channels but dried up before reaching the basin they filled.

More likely to have previous ice deposits on the Martian surface

Finally, the researchers, who wanted to look at the age of the salt deposits, could not perform the crater count due to the narrowness of the deposits. Instead, they focused on the history of the rock beds beneath the deposits. In one area, he found a salt deposit on top of a 3.3-billion-year-old rock that was altered by an event 2 billion years ago. In another region, a salt deposit located on volcanic deposits 2.3 billion years ago was detected. With this research; This is the newest information we have learned about when Mars got so cold and took on an atmosphere that would not allow liquid.

In line with these results, the researchers think that Mars did not have a permanent presence of water in the past, but instead had seasonal water and may have large ice deposits.