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A newly-published analysis of Mars surface imagery strongly suggests the valleys long attributed to flowing streams and a warm climate can largely (if not exclusively) be the result of sub-glacial water flows and a colder climate.
FULL STORY: https://scitechdaily.com/new-findings-throw-cold-water-on-ancient-mars-hypothesis/
New Findings Throw Cold Water on Ancient Mars Hypothesis
Early Mars was covered in ice sheets, not flowing rivers.
A large number of the valley networks scarring Mars’s surface were carved by water melting beneath glacial ice, not by free-flowing rivers as previously thought, according to new UBC research published today (August 3, 2020) in Nature Geoscience. The findings effectively throw cold water on the dominant “warm and wet ancient Mars” hypothesis, which postulates that rivers, rainfall, and oceans once existed on the red planet.
To reach this conclusion, lead author Anna Grau Galofre, former PhD student in the department of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences, developed and used new techniques to examine thousands of Martian valleys. She and her co-authors also compared the Martian valleys to the subglacial channels in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and uncovered striking similarities.
“For the last 40 years, since Mars’s valleys were first discovered, the assumption was that rivers once flowed on Mars, eroding and originating all of these valleys,” says Grau Galofre. “But there are hundreds of valleys on Mars, and they look very different from each other. If you look at Earth from a satellite you see a lot of valleys: some of them made by rivers, some made by glaciers, some made by other processes, and each type has a distinctive shape. Mars is similar, in that valleys look very different from each other, suggesting that many processes were at play to carve them.” ...
FULL STORY: https://scitechdaily.com/new-findings-throw-cold-water-on-ancient-mars-hypothesis/