NASA confirms Mars region had thousands of ancient volcanic eruptions - Fox News

The so-called "super eruptions" occurred in a region of northern Mars called Arabia Terra over a period of 500 million years dating back approximately 4 billion years.

"Each one of these eruptions would have had a significant climate impact — maybe the released gas made the atmosphere thicker or blocked the sun and made the atmosphere colder," Patrick Whelley, a geologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who led the Arabia Terra analysis, said in a release.

"Modelers of the Martian climate will have some work to do to try to understand the impact of the volcanoes.".

They made three-dimensional topographic maps of Arabia Terra and compared mineral data to the maps in order to see that the layers of ash were well preserved.

This image shows several craters in Arabia Terra that are filled with layered rock, often exposed in rounded mounds

NASA will use calculations of how much material would have exploded from the volcanoes based on the volume of each caldera to determine the number of eruptions

"These types of explosive volcanoes also could exist in regions of Jupiter’s moon or could have been clustered on Venus."