New observations of mud cracks made by NASA’s Curiosity rover show that high-frequency, wet-dry cycling occurred in early Martian surface environments, indicating that the Red Planet may have once seen seasonal weather patterns or even flash floods.
Mars has a well preserved sedimentary record that dates as far back as 4.3 billion years ago and perhaps earlier.
The early presence of habitable environments and even perennially wet surface environments has been well established.
Little is known, however, about short-term episodicity and potential periodicity in early hydroclimate regimes.
Post-depositional processes driven by short-term fluctuations in a hydroclimate regime mostly leave surficial imprints (for example, mud cracks).
Although these surficial imprints are prone to erosion, they are nonetheless critical for understanding past surface environments.
More generally, widely diverging models of the seasonality and episodicity of early Mars’s water cycle and aridity are poorly constrained.
“The new exciting observations of mature mud cracks are allowing us to fill in some of the missing history of water on Mars,” said senior author Dr. Nina Lanza, principal investigator of the ChemCam instrument onboard the Curiosity rover and a researcher with Los Alamos National Laboratory.
“How did Mars go from a warm, wet planet to the cold, dry place we know today?”
“These mud cracks show us that transitional time, when liquid water was less abundant but still active on the Martian surface.”
“These features also point to the existence of wet-dry environments that on Earth are extremely conducive to the development of organic molecules and potentially life.”
“Taken as a whole, these results a giving us a clearer picture of Mars as a habitable world.”
After years of exploring terrain largely comprised of silicates, Curiosity entered a new area filled with sulfates, marking a major environment transition.
In this new environment, Dr. Lanza…
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