Mars Researchers Discover A Buried Martian Beach Billions Of Years Old

A recently published study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is creating quite a bit of buzz in the scientific community. The study, made by a group of Chinese and American scientists, reveals evidence that claims to have found beach deposits from an ancient Martian ocean. Up till now, scientists have agreed that the Red Planet once had water and rivers that carved the planet's numerous valley networks. Water on an oceanic scale (a.k.a. Mars ocean theory), on the other hand, has been more of a contentious topic.

However, this latest report, analyzed from ground imaging data from China's Zhurong rover, seems to support that an ocean (or oceans) existed, large enough to create coastal sediment very similar to that on Earth. Zhurong was deployed on Mars between 2021 to 2022, specifically targeting ridges in the northern hemisphere called paleoshorelines—ridges that potentially held clues to a global ocean within Utopia Planitia, the largest impact basin on Mars spanning 3,300 km (2,050 miles) in diameter.

The area was chosen because previous ground-penetrating radar showed that the northern lowlands of Mars indicated features in the subsurface material that are tilted and angled towards the direction of an ocean. Dr Benjamin Cardenas, a co-author of the research from Penn State University said that "it’s a simple structure, but it tells you there had to be tides, there had to be waves, there had to be a nearby river supplying sediment, and all these things had to be active for some extended period of time." 

The team ruled out other phenomenon, such as rivers, wind-blown sand dunes, and volcanic activities, as their findings don't match those situations. Cardenas adds, "all of these are pretty commonly seen on Mars, but the structure just doesn’t fit any of them."