Are These Signs of Water Discovered on Mars?

Amaze Lab

Despite what it might look like at the moment, experts believe that Mars once had plenty of liquid water on it. Unfortunately much of its atmosphere has been lost and with that a lot of its water, maybe all of its liquid water, was sucked out into space over billions of years. But now, the Chinese Zhurong Rover has found crevices in the Martian surface, something that points to flowing water much more recently than anyone could have predicted.

Transcript

00:00Despite what it might be like at the moment, experts believe that Mars once had plenty of

00:08liquid water on it. Unfortunately, much of its atmosphere has been lost, and with that,

00:12a lot of its water. Maybe all of its liquid water was sucked out into space over billions of years.

00:17But now the Chinese Zurong rover has found crevices in the Martian surface,

00:21something that points to flowing water much more recently than anyone would have predicted.

00:25The cracks were found in the Barkan Dunes, part of the largest impact basin on Mars.

00:30Researchers say they mirror sand dunes on Earth, with giant deposits of Martian soil gathering into

00:35large wave-like hills. And also, just like areas like this on Earth, they noticed cracks in the crust,

00:40where on Earth they are formed when water from thawing snow rushed through the area.

00:44The same thing they believe happened here. However, they think it happened between 1.4 million

00:48and just 400,000 years ago. The crazy thing is that experts believe Mars had pretty much the

00:53exact same conditions back then as it does today. Meaning just like back then, when liquid water

00:58flowed to form these cracks, it's extremely likely it's still happening somewhere today.

01:03And where there's water, there's a good chance there could also be microbial life.

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