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Brown University / NASA

Scientists are interested in the ancient history of Mars because if the arid planet were warm and humid, it might be habitable.

And one new study of an unnamed volcano on Mars suggests a new possibility of Mars’s past.

NASA / Benjamin Boatwright

Maps of where water is flowing inside the crater floor

A spacecraft orbiting the red planet captured incredible images of the rough terrain of the crater in the southern highlands of Mars. This 33.5-mile (54 km) wide crater dates from 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago to the Nuxian period, when Mars was warmer and may have been home to water and ice bodies, essential components of life like what we know on Earth.

Boatwright & Head, doi: 10.3847 / PSJ / abe773

In a new study, scientists at Brown University took a look at the distinct hills and geological features of this crater that were visible in images from NASA's Mars Exploration Orbiter.

According to their paper published in Planetary Science Journal, the team noticed that these formations are different from those found in other craters.

While all of the pits in the range of their comparative analysis contained signs of water flowing within, the unnamed crater showed no signs of water penetrating its wall to reach the interior. They also found that there was no evidence that groundwater was the source of the hills inside the crater.

This puzzled the research team, and they came up with an explanation that the source of the liquid water was a glacier that melted from top to bottom.

There is no doubt that the climate of Mars was once warmer and wetter than the frozen desert that our planet lives today. What is less clear, however, is whether Mars has an Earth-like climate with water flowing continuously for thousands of years, or whether it is cold and icy with transient periods of warmth and melt.

This discovery has implications beyond this single hole only. For this glacier to exist in the first place, Mars may not have been consistently temperate during the Nuxian period. Perhaps, instead, it was a cold place full of many other glaciers, and the liquid water that leaves its fingerprints in many places across the Red Planet could be the result of melting ice that formed shortly after the planets warmed.

Source: Space

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