40-Story Mega-Tsunamis Probably Shaped the Martian Landscape
Until recently, scientists have more or less assumed that the red planet’s landscape formed as the result of catastrophic floods some 3.4 billion years ago. But new evidence suggests that the Martian landscape we see today is actually the result of two prehistoric mega-tsunamis– that probably took place over a million years apart.
Researchers from the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona say evidence supporting the flood theory had always come up short. So they decided to study the Martian landscape a little (ok, a lot) closer and found that when the planet was about 1.1 billion years old, the first tsunami hit. A similar size tsunami hit again about a million years later.
So how big is an extraterrestrial mega-tsunami? Well, the waves reached about 400 feet tall, with shore-breaks at about 150 feet tall. I used to live on an island, so I’ve seen waves reaching 60 feet– and surfers looking like mice riding them. Sometimes they even need to close down portions of coastal roads in the fall. But that’s nothing compared to these mega-tsunamis. To put it into perspective: 400 feet is roughly about the same height as a 40 story building. Oh and the research team thinks the second tsunami included ice-boulders. Yikes.
As you can imagine, studying the prehistoric landscape on Mars would be tedious work. So how did they figure this tsunami-business out anyways? They used infrared images to conduct a detailed study of patterns and channels created by moving sediment and boulders, along with the material deposits left behind. The research team also thinks they’ve discovered what caused these mega-tsunamis: massive meteor impacts. The craters they found to support this theory are about 18 miles in diameter and occurred roughly 1 million years apart– just like the mega-tsunamis. That’s two giant meteors larger than the city of Burbank, California.
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This new evidence might seem like cool but rather useless information– it’s not. The research team thinks they can actually use it to possibly study previous life on Mars. Despite being cold and dry, the briny composition of Martian’ water could have allowed it to stay in liquid form for tens-of-millions of years. Salt lowers the freezing point of water. That’s why us in the unfortunate cold-winter states dump salt on the road to melt the ice.
In the million years between the two mega-tsunamis, puddles, lakes, and ponds would have formed after the water levels receded–which could have sustained some kind of life. So those are the areas that the Arizona team will be studying next! Don’t get your hopes up though, any life they find will probably look more like sea monkeys than anything even close to resembling a human or mammal. But you never know!
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Randi Nord lives in Pontiac, Michigan. She is a journalist for the The Fifth Column, co-founder of Geopolitics Alert, and co-hosts a podcast about geopolitics.