Mars Global Ocean may have dried up from years of dust storms

In 2018, NASA’s Opportunity rover stopped working after landing on Mars due to a sandstorm that weaned its solar power and drained its batteries. A recent study suggests that the same type of storm may have been the cause of the Red Planet’s water loss.

“Mars was once a wet planet,” the researchers wrote, but most of it was lost due to the escape of hydrogen from the upper atmosphere and into space. The evidence was confirmed by NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter.

MAVEN entered the orbit of Mars in 2014 with the mission to enter the higher orbit and observe the entire planet. The data sent to Earth gave scientists a better understanding of Mars’ climatic history.

How did a possible habitable planet become barren? Has Mars been eroded by the solar wind? These were some of the questions the MAVEN mission could have answers to.

Dust storms carrying water vapor

A recent study in the journal Science reveals how sandstorms could have pumped all surface water into space and actually made Mars dry, explained Anna Fedorova of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

One of the ways hydrogen escaped Mars is from the Sun’s ultraviolet light. UV light can split water on the planet’s surface, sending small amounts of hydrogen and oxygen into the upper atmosphere and into space.

Additionally, MAVEN detected a global dust storm in 2018 as water was escaping into space, Shane Stone of the University of Arizona explained. Dust storms causing water loss were first suspected in 2014, after UV observations had been made years earlier by the Mars Express orbiter and the Hubble Space Telescope.

(Photo: This artists concept illustrates a Martian sandstorm, which could also crackle with electricity. Credits: NASA)

Both research teams noticed a fluorescent mist of hydrogen in the atmosphere during a global storm in 2007, which could have come from water. It was the first song “of something weird going on,” said Michael Chaffin of the Mars Express team.

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) also found traces of water in the upper atmosphere during the summer season in the Southern Hemisphere. There were traces of water and semi-heavy water when “warmer temperatures during the sandstorm cause more atmospheric circulation and prevent ice cloud formation” and instead confined water vapor, the authors wrote in another study. . Water vapor in the lower atmosphere is then swirled in the atmosphere rather than space during the storm.

While TGO observations revealed how water vapor increased during summer storms, MAVEN’s evidence suggests global storms generate most of the water particles. Aside from the UV light that splits water molecules as they travel through space, Stone’s team explains another way water escapes from the upper atmosphere of Mars.

Read also: NASA: The Perseverance Rover is halfway to Mars

Solar wind splitting water

Carbon dioxide could be ionized by the solar wind and “vigorously splits water molecules.” The team also calculated that Mars lost water in the amount of an 82-foot-deep global ocean.

However, it remains uncertain whether sandstorms and the solar wind dried up Mars recently or billions of years ago. It is also possible that the planet had a protective magnetic field that failed to protect the ocean from the solar wind and dust storms. It may even be possible that all of these speculations will be answered by samples that NASA’s Perseverance Rover will bring back to Earth.

Read also: The signs of the bodies of water in the south pole of Mars suggest life

Find out more Mars news and information in the Science Times.