Mars Curiosity Rover finds traces of an ancient megaflood

Scientists already know that Mars wasn’t always the global desert it is today. Now, new data collected by NASA’s Curiosity Rover reveals that the Red Planet did indeed have a significantly larger area in its distant past than previously thought. A study published in the scientific journal Nature earlier this month it pointed to evidence of “raging megafloods” that washed the surface of Mars some four billion years ago.

Researchers have discovered wave-like structures, or antidunes, left by these megafloods in the sedimentary layers of Mars. Some are identical to the geological features formed by the melting of ice on Earth about two million years ago.

The discovery is revolutionary. “We identified megafloods for the first time using detailed sedimentological data observed by the Curiosity rover,” said Alberto G. Fairén, one of the study’s co-authors. “The deposits left by the megafloods had not previously been identified with the orbiting data.”

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The study is being conducted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in collaboration with researchers from Jackson State University, Cornell University and the University of Hawaii.

The Curiosity rover reported sediment data from Mars’s Gale crater, where scientists believe it was a lake. An earlier study of Curiosity data found that ancient storms, even four billion years ago, once formed rivers and lakes in this area.

As for the recently discovered megafloods, the researchers believe that antidunes, which rise up to 30 feet high and spread 450 feet apart, may have been formed from water up to 78 feet deep it poured into the crater at a rate of 32 feet per second.

The extreme flooding was likely caused by an asteroid hitting the red planet and melting a large chunk of ice covering the planet’s surface at the time.

More importantly, this is further evidence that Mars used to sustain an abundant amount of life. Decades of observations by orbiters and surface rovers have established that Mars was a habitable planet in the distant past. Whether life was actually hosted, however, will be a question for the next Mars rover, as Curiosity is nearing the end of its life.

Curiosity has been wandering the Red Planet for more than eight years (2950 sol or 3031 Earth days). Its successor, NASA’s Perseverance rover, was launched on July 30. The landing is expected in the Jezero crater of Mars, on February 18, 2021.