NASA rover discovers liquid water 'ripples' carved into Mars rock -- and it could rewrite the Red Planet's history

By Joanna Thompson
published 3 hours ago

NASA's Curiosity rover photographed remnants of rippling waves in an ancient Martian lakebed, proving that the Red Planet had open water for longer in its history than previously thought.



NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover discovered symmetric ripple marks at two separate spots within the Red Planet’s Gale Crater — offering strong evidence that Mars was flowed with open, liquid water. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

Scientists have discovered evidence that liquid water was once exposed to the air in ancient, shallow lakes on Mars. The finding is evidence that not all water on the Red Planet was covered in ice, as some Martian climate models suggest.

Planetary geologists and astronomers studying Mars have known for decades that water was once likely present on the planet, after NASA's Mariner 9 mission captured images of dry gullies in the 1970s. But there has been ongoing debate about what form that water took and how long it lasted. Some models predict that any liquid water on Mars' surface must have been covered by sheets of ice before it disappeared.

However, the new findings, which were published Jan. 15 in the journal Science Advances,, tell a different story. The patterns, which were photographed by NASA's Curiosity rover, are known as wave ripples — minute ridge-like structures that form along the shores of lakebeds. This means that exposed liquid water must have flowed across Mars' surface at some point in its history. The ripples were present in two separate lakebeds in Gale Crater, which Curiosity has been exploring since Aug. 2012.

"The shape of the ripples could only have been formed under water that was open to the atmosphere and acted upon by wind," study first author Claire Mondro, a sedimentologist at CalTech, said in a statement.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/space/mars/nasa-rover-discovers-liquid-water-ripples-carved-into-mars-rock-and-it-could-rewrite-the-red-planets-history