HONG KONG: Researchers have found that a primitive ocean on Mars may have once held more water than in the entire Arctic Ocean. This suggests a very different planet to the dusty Martian planet of today, writes Nature World News. This study was published in the journal Science.
The paper details how scientists determined the amount of water once present on Mars by estimating the amount lost to space.
Researchers concluded that the Red Planet only holds a mere 13 percent of all the water it once had – water, which is now frozen in vast swaths of ice at its poles.
“With this work, we can better understand the history of water on Mars,” study lead Geronimo Villanueva, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.
According to the estimates from Villanueva and his team, the water present on Mars would be enough to cover the entire surface in a liquid layer about 450 feet (137 meters) deep.
However, this does not mean that Mars was once a watery planet.
Instead, a vast singular ocean likely occupied the great majority of its northern hemisphere.
In this region, it is likely that some parts of the ocean would have reached as deep as a mile or more.
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