Evidence of Giant Tsunamis Found on Mars
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It was big news when researchers discovered narrow streams of water on mars, but now they have discovered evidence that leads them to believe Mars may have had way more water than that.
About 3.4 billion years ago, meteoroids slammed into the red planet making waves (literally) as big as 400 feet high.
An icy ocean once lay in Mars’ northern hemisphere, evidence suggests, as remnants of a shoreline marks some of the terrain “like a bathtub ring left behind when the water drained away,” the Scientific American reports. However, the existence of this ancient ocean was debated because some of the marks did not appear where they should have.
But the tsunamis change that.
Alexis Rodriguez, a Mars researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, had the idea tsunamis hit the planet after visiting Japan in 2011 when it was hit with horrendous tsunamis.
Rodriguez and her group studied the Martian terrain and found formations that looked like they were formed during catastrophic tsunamis.
Two tsunamis likely occurred millions of years apart. The first one left channels in the Martian rock while the second one, since temperatures were a lot colder, froze in those channels leaving icy deposits that remained unchanged all this time.
According to Scientific American, Rodriguez is currently looking for more evidence of giant waves.
“Imagine this enormous red wave coming towards you, up to 120 meters high,” he said. “It would have been pretty spectacular.”
