Photos from NASA's Perseverance rover indicate ancient flash floods on Mars
BY ALEXANDRA LARKIN
OCTOBER 9, 2021 / 1:04 PM / CBS NEWS
A new study from the team behind NASA's Perseverance Mars rover reveals that areas of Mars — specifically the Jezero Crater, an area scientists think may hold keys to ancient Martian life — experienced "significant" flash floods that carved the landscape into the rocky wasteland we see today.
The team says they based their findings on images the rover took of sediment that gathered at the end of an ancient river that fed a lake inside the Jezero Crater.
The photos, taken during a landing on February 18 and published on Thursday, suggest that billions of years ago, Mars had a thick atmosphere that could support large quantities of water. The sediment seen in the pictures shows a now-barren river delta that experienced "late-stage flooding events" whose waters carried boulders and debris from Mars highlands to the banks of the crater.
"Never before has such well-preserved stratigraphy been visible on Mars," said lead author Nicolas Mangold from the Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique. "This is the key observation that enables us to once and for all confirm the presence of a lake and river delta at Jezero. Getting a better understanding of the hydrology months in advance of our arrival at the delta is going to pay big dividends down the road."
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/photos-nasa-perseverance-rover-ancient-flash-floods-mars/
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SPACE 7 October 2021
By Jason Arunn Murugesu
A cliff face on Mars
Rock layers in Kodiak butte on Mars in an image taken by the Perseverance rover
NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/IRAP/LPG
The ancient lake that once sat in Jezero crater on Mars flooded billions of years ago, transporting large boulders through a river delta and depositing fine-grained clay that could potentially preserve signs of ancient life.
Nicolas Mangold at the University of Nantes in France and his colleagues analysed photographs of a cliff face taken by NASA’s Perseverance rover from February to May 2021.
The researchers identified three parts of a rock formation shown in the images called Kodiak butte, at the opening of the lake. At the top, there are large boulders, the biggest of which is 1.5 metres wide and 1 metre high, that suggest the flow of water into the lake sped up enough at one point that it could carry the rocks over tens of kilometres.
Below the boulders, they found a build-up of sediment that points to a steady and consistent river flow before the boulder-carrying floods hit the crater. We have no idea what caused the floods, Mangold says.
More:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2293108-ancient-mars-lake-had-fast-moving-floods-that-carried-huge-boulders/?utm_source=onesignal&utm_medium=push&utm_campaign=2021-10-10-Ancient-martian