by Buried several meters below the equator of Mars is a large honeycomb pattern similar to what is found near the Earth’s frigid poles.
Each crevasse spans 70 meters (230 feet)—about half a football field—and is bordered by a 30-meter-wide (98-foot) slurry of ice and mud. It is likely, scientists say, that this material is somewhere between 2 billion and 3.5 billion years old. The patterns were seen in data sent home by the now-incommunicado Zhurong rover from China that explored a vast, bumpy region north of Mars’ equator called Utopia Planitia.
Zhuruong went just over one kilometer (0.6 miles) towards the southern region of Mars in that year alone, but even during such a short trip, his radar detected a continuous pattern of 15 buried polygons – suggesting that that there would be more waiting to be there. was found, study lead author Lei Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told Space.com in an email.
On Earth, similar patterns are known to form only in Greenland, Iceland and Antarctica when the land is cut and broken by significant temperature drops caused by seasonal changes. Ice and mud filling these cracks stop them from ever healing, causing the surface to crack further. A similar process on Mars, about 2 billion to 3.5 billion years ago, would have caused the newly detected cracks, which are thousands of meters larger than any found on our planet. “The polygons are huge,” said Zhang.
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This discovery, in short, provides fresh evidence that the Red Planet hosted water and a climate friendly to life as we know it.
Most significantly, the pattern also suggests that tropical regions on Mars were cold enough to form cracks similar to those seen near Earth’s icy poles. The mystery could be answered by an existing (but unproven) theory which suggests that Mars was much more tilted back than it is today – up to forty degrees or more – around 5 million a year ago. “Such a highly skewed scenario treads the waters between thinking about polar regions as cold and low and warm,” Zhang said.
William Rapin, a scientist at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in Paris, who was not affiliated with the new research, says the newfound underground polygon pattern is an “interesting discovery” and could help understand the inner workings. critical period on. Mars may be hospitable towards life. Rapin was part of a team that recently received similar sized centimeter mud cracks on the Martian surface near Gale crater currently being explored by NASA’s Curiosity rover.
Accessing areas from such an ancient period on Earth is difficult because our planet regularly recycles its surface. But on Mars, “we have all those strata in very good condition,” Rapin said. “So we can investigate an era that was possibly favorable for the origin of life itself.”
The tilt or obliquity of Mars has changed over the past 3.5 billion years. If it were not inclined at all, the equator would be the warmest due to receiving the most direct light, and the temperature would fall towards the poles. But computer models show that the wobbly planet was over-elevated a few million years ago, meaning that where sunlight landed changed over the course of the year. For half of its orbit around the sun, about six months, Mars in this era experienced nights that “reached” as far as its equator, Rapin said.
Mars’ tilt is known to change more than Earth’s, having shifted more than ten degrees over 100,000 years. In fact, it is this change that scientists believe caused such dramatic changes in its climate, turning it from a mono-blue oasis to the red-hot land we see today. But the newly discovered polygon pattern could help scientists narrow it down When those big climate changes happened, Zhang said.
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The fact that the pattern was detected 35 meters (115 feet) below the surface “means the polygons that were formed, developed over time, but then stopped suddenly,” he explained. The same temperature swings should not have affected the recent Martian soil, leaving it layered on top of those cracks. “The time when the polygons stopped could be a time when the climate changed – suddenly switching from a relatively cold climate to a fairly nice climate.”
The rover Zhurong went silent late last year when it failed to emerge from its scheduled hibernation, and scientists assume it succumbed to heavy dust storms on Mars. Meanwhile, NASA’s Curiosity rover, which reached 4,000 days on Mars last month, will reach terrain next year marked with fractures large enough to see from orbit. Rapin hypothesizes that they may represent an ancient, extreme drought and hopes to compare them to the newly discovered polygons at Utopia Planitia.
“They are pretty much,” said Rapin. “It’s kind of a dream come true for them.”
This research is described in a paper published last month in the journal Nature Astronomy.
