Traces of Ancient Ocean Discovered on Mars – This Means a “Higher Potential for

Stitched together from 28 images, this view from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover was captured after the rover ascended the steep slope of a geologic feature called “Greenheugh Pediment.” In the distance at the top of the image is the floor of Gale Crater, which is near a region called Aeolis Dorsa that researchers believe was once a massive ocean. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

New evidence for an ancient northern ocean on

Whether Mars had an ocean in its low-elevation northern hemisphere has long been debated in the scientific community, Cardenas explained. Using topography data, the research team was able to show definitive evidence of a roughly 3.5-billion-year-old shoreline with substantial sedimentary accumulation, at least 900 meters (3,000 feet) thick, that covered hundreds of thousands of square kilometers.

A recently released set of topography maps provide new evidence for an ancient northern ocean on Mars. Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State says the maps offer the strongest case yet that the planet once experienced sea-level rise consistent with an extended warm and wet climate, not the harsh, frozen landscape that exists today. Credit: Penn State

“The big, novel thing that we did in this paper was think about Mars in terms of its stratigraphy and its sedimentary record,” Cardenas said. “On Earth, we chart the history of waterways by looking at sediment that is deposited over time. We call that stratigraphy, the idea that water transports sediment and you can measure the changes on Earth by understanding the way that sediment piles up. That’s what we’ve done here — but it’s Mars.”

Using software developed by the United States Geological Survey,  the research team generated the maps with data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Traces of Ancient Ocean Discovered on Mars – This Means a “Higher Potential for