Mega Tsunamis have Attacked Mars in the Past
Mega tsunamis, towering almost 400 feet in height, purportedly obliterated ancient shorelines on Mars some 3.4 billion years ago according to Arizona-based scientists in a report published on Thursday this week.
In a recently published paper featured in Nature Scientific Reports by Planetary Science Institute (PSI), lead author J. Alexis Palmero Rodriguez hypothetically stated the possibility of a massive meteor impact triggering huge waves with the enormous destructive capacity to wipe out various types of shoreline features which the scientists are still working on to identify.
"For more than a quarter century, failure to identify shoreline features consistently distributed along a constant elevation has been regarded as inconsistent with the hypothesis that a vast ocean existed on Mars approximately 3.4 billion years ago," said Rodriguez as quoted in a Fox News report.
"Our discovery offers a simple solution to this problem; widespread tsunami deposits distributed within a wide range of elevations likely characterize the shorelines of early Martian oceans."
The scientists also noted that the purported meteor crash left a 19-mile wide crater. As the water retreated further into the ocean, the original shoreline was obscured leaving behind hints such as channels that remind scientists of ancient clues to the planet's original elevation, New York Times reported. After the catastrophic event, the researchers hypothesized that the planet may have undergone a climatic freeze causing the ocean's topmost layer to freeze like an icy lake during winter.
Right now, the surface of the so-called red planet appears cold and dry. Astronomers, however, point out that there is a plethora of suggestive evidence that indicate that Mars was once covered with water eons ago. And when there is water, there is life. If Mars used to have oceans, there is a likelihood that life could have existed and, even now, the possibility of life remains positive when there is water hidden beneath the surface.
In the absence of a solid proof, the debate over the existence of ancient Martian oceans continues. But images of purported shorelines chiseled by waves is a promising discovery. Also, thermal snapshots of what may be ancient scars caused by two mega tsunamis in the planet's northern plains could also point to the possibility that Mars may have actually had salty but icy cold ocean.
"Our work provides definitive evidence for the presence of large and long-lived oceans on Mars," study co-author Alberto Fairén, a planetary scientist at the Center of Astrobiology in Madrid and Cornell University in New York as per Space.Com report.
