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Ancient Mars may have been covered in ice, not water, study suggests - Fox News

Ancient Mars may have been covered in ice, not water, study suggests - Fox News

Ancient Mars may have been covered in ice, not water, study suggests - Fox News
Aug 05, 2020 1 min, 35 secs

As the Perseverance rover heads to Mars to look for signs of ancient life, a new study suggests the Red Planet could have been "covered in ice sheets" and not a valley of rivers, as previously thought.

The research theorizes that if the valleys on Mars work the same way they do on Earth--in particular, those in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago--they would have been formed by water melting beneath glacial ice.

"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," said the study's lead author, Arizona State University Geophysicist Anna Grau Galofre, in a statement.

Mars is similar, in that valleys look very different from each other, suggesting that many processes were at play to carve them.".

"These results are the first evidence for extensive subglacial erosion driven by channelized meltwater drainage beneath an ancient ice sheet on Mars," study co-author Mark Jellinek added. "The findings demonstrate that only a fraction of valley networks match patterns typical of surface water erosion, which is in marked contrast to the conventional view.

NASA THINKS ALIEN LIFE MIGHT BE HIDING UNDERGROUND IN ANCIENT CAVES ON MARS.

The researchers also noted that valleys that may have been formed by melting water from underneath glaciers were spread across the planet, while those formed by rivers were near Arabia Terra, according to Space.com.

A study published in March suggested the Red Planet had two unique reservoirs of ancient water that once flowed deep beneath the planet's surface.

In June, researchers suggested Mars could have been a ringed planet in its ancient past, as one of its moons, Deimos, has a slightly altered orbit that suggests there was something responsible for its slight tilt

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