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posted by chromas on Saturday March 02 2019, @05:05AM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The revelations come via some plucky Mars geologists and the European Space Agency's Mars Express Orbiter. The spacecraft, launched in 2003, constantly circles the planet and is fitted with a number of high resolution cameras constantly snapping images of the Martian surface. Researchers at the University of Utrecht, led by Francesco Salese, pored over these images, intently studying 24 deep craters in Mars northern hemisphere looking for signs that water once flowed there.

Their findings, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets[0], show that almost all of these craters give signs that they once contained flowing water. That led the researchers to believe that Mars once had a reserve of water locked between 4,000 and 5,000 metres below Mars' sea level.

[...] The craters show a wide variety of features: Channels carved by water into their walls, evidence of sapping valleys formed by erosion and the presence of shorelines and terraces created by standing water. There was also evidence of deltas -- which are formed by slow moving water dropping sediment -- in 15 of the 24 craters. The researchers did not find evidence the water had flowed in from outside the craters, leading them to believe that they were fed from the ground up.

Because every crater showed geological remnants of water activity between approx. 4,000 and 4,800 metres, the team suggests the idea that all of the craters they studied may have been connected by the same underground water system -- though they can't be sure based on this evidence alone.

[0PDF seems to be stored in a jar of molasses]


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 02 2019, @10:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 02 2019, @10:46PM (#809264)

    Remember, these are millennial geologists. They deserve praise for trying.

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