“Very early in the history of Mars, perhaps 4 billion years ago, the planet was warm enough to support lakes and river networks,” Kite told Ars. “There were seas, and some of those seas were the size of the Caspian Sea, perhaps bigger. It was a wet place.” However, this wet period did not last long – it was too short to let the landscape eradicate deeply and deeply eradicated.
The Kite team used their model to concentrate on what happened when the planet became colder when the Zouten era began. “Large areas of snowmobms created huge salt apartments, which were eventually built up over time, accumulated in a thick sedimentary deposit Curiosity Rover is currently investigating,” said Kite. But the Zouten era did not mark the end of liquid water on the Mars surface.
Flickering inhabitability
The landscape became dry, based on the standards of the earth, about 3.5 billion years ago. “There were long periods in which the planet was completely dry,” said Kite. During these dry periods, Mars was almost as cold as it is today. But occasionally small areas with liquid water appear on the Mars surface as oases in the midst of an other unwanted desert. It was a sterile planet with flickering, transient habitable spots with water from melted snow.
This rather gloomy image of the evolution of the landscape of Martian makes questions about our opportunities to find traces of life there difficult.
“You can do a thought experiment where you take a cup of water from the ocean of the earth and pour it in one of those temporary lakes,” Kite said. “Some microbes in this cup of water would do well in such circumstances.” The bigger question, he thinks, is whether life could arise (instead of just surviving) on old march. And, perhaps more critical, or the hypothetical life that even arose before the era of the salts, when the planet was hot and wet, could continue to exist in the oases that pop up in the kite of the kite.
Unfortunately, the answer is probably not.
