Huge seas 'once existed on Mars'

Source: BBC News

US scientists have found further evidence that huge seas existed long ago on Mars.

A geological mapping project found sedimentary deposits in a region called Hellas Planitia which suggest a large sea once stood there.

The 2,000 km-wide, 8km-deep Hellas basin is a giant impact crater - the largest such structure on Mars.

The researchers say their data support a lake between 4.5 and 3.5 billion years ago.

Some scientists believe that conditions on Mars were more favourable for the evolution of life at this time than they were on Earth.

"This mapping makes geologic interpretations consistent with previous studies, and constrains the timing of these putative lakes to the early-middle Noachian period on Mars," said Dr Leslie Bleamaster, research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson.


The Hellas basin is the largest impact structure on Mars

Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10264182.stm

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See also:

Existence of historic lakes on Mars confirmed
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=228x67640

unless we change course

not for a few billion years.

"Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 8/11/89 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)

:hi:

Ah, an aggressive people, were they not?

The planet could really use some greenhouse gasses.

It won't have it though. Mars may have had water and microbial life at one point, but it's extremely unlikely that it existed in enough abundance to generate the amount of organic matter needed for the formation of large petroleum deposits. There MIGHT be small pockets of it, and possibly even small coal layers here and there, if life did exist for an extended period of time, but their formation on Earth required the presence of full blown swamps and riverine habitats, and not just some microbes and small single celled organisms.

Most of the terraforming proposals for Mars hinge on the idea of dumping massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into the Martian atmosphere.

looking for oil that simply could not be there. :)

saying: "There used to be life there... I wonder what happened."

Thanks for the thread, Ian David.

You bastids!

Let's see to it that we're not making the same observation about the Gulf of Mexico in a year.