{"id":525373,"date":"2026-01-18T15:09:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-18T15:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/525373\/"},"modified":"2026-01-18T15:09:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T15:09:12","slug":"scientists-have-figured-out-how-blue-the-red-planet-used-to-be-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/525373\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Have Figured Out How Blue The Red Planet Used to Be : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mars<\/a> is absolutely dripping with evidence that the red planet was once a striking blue, complete with glistening lakes<\/a>, snaking rivers<\/a>, and vast oceans<\/a>. Now, scientists have calculated the ‘sea level’ during the wettest time known in Martian history.<\/p>\n

Examining data from three satellites, scientists in Italy and Switzerland homed in on a canyon called Coprates Chasma<\/a> \u2013 itself part of Valles Marineris<\/a>, the largest canyon network in the Solar System.<\/p>\n

There, satellite images showed fan-shaped deposits that look suspiciously like the kind of river deltas<\/a> that form on our home planet when running water meets a standing body.<\/p>\n

Related: Life on Mars? NASA’s Stunning Discovery Is The Best Evidence Yet<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

“Delta structures develop where rivers debouch into oceans, as we know from numerous examples on Earth,” says<\/a> Fritz Schlunegger, geomorphologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland.<\/p>\n

“The structures that we were able to identify in the images are clearly the mouth of a river into an ocean.”<\/p>\n

\"\"A model of the Martian coastline. (ESA\/ExoMars \u2013 TGO\/CaSSIS\/Ignatius Argadestya)<\/p>\n

All of the delta-like structures<\/a> were found at elevations of 3,650 to 3,750 meters (11,975 to 12,300 feet) below the Martian surface reference level<\/a>. That puts it at about 1,000 meters above the deepest point in Valles Marineris, and would make for a sea roughly the size of our own Arctic Ocean.<\/p>\n

“We were able to provide evidence for the deepest and largest former ocean on Mars to date \u2013 an ocean that stretched across the northern hemisphere of the planet,” says<\/a> Ignatius Argadestya, geologist at the University of Bern.<\/p>\n

The researchers estimate that the deposits were laid around 3 billion years ago, which would make this period “the time with the largest availability of surface water on Mars,” they write<\/a>. Intriguingly, that’s a few hundred million years later than previous estimates<\/a> for the existence of a Martian ocean.<\/p>\n

\"Subscribe<\/a><\/p>\n

Whether all this water escaped up<\/a> or drained down<\/a>, increasing evidence points to a lush and potentially habitable past for our currently dry, dusty neighbor. Since life appeared on Earth relatively quickly, there’s a chance that Mars was also briefly home<\/a> to early organisms of some kind.<\/p>\n

The researchers suggest that these newly identified coastlines might represent some of the most promising places<\/a> to search for traces of ancient extraterrestrials<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The research was published in the journal npj Space Exploration<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mars is absolutely dripping with evidence that the red planet was once a striking blue, complete with glistening…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":402285,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[352,159,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-525373","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-msft-content","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115916738939907421","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=525373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=525373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=525373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=525373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}