New research reveals that ancient Mars once hosted vast river drainage systems comparable in scale to some of Earth’s major watersheds.
Billions of years ago, rainfall shaped the surface of Mars. Water moved across the landscape and gathered in valleys and river channels, eventually filling craters until they overflowed. These flows then traveled through canyons and may even have reached a large ocean that once existed on the planet.
On Earth, regions surrounding major river systems are among the most biologically rich places known. A well-known example is the Amazon River basin, home to tens of thousands of documented species. Scientists believe that if Mars once hosted river networks similar to those on Earth, those areas could have provided favorable conditions for early life when liquid water was still present.
A new study clearly identify large river drainage systems on Mars. The team mapped 16 extensive basins that would have offered some of the most promising environments for life on the planet.
“We’ve known for a long time that there were rivers on Mars,” said co-author Timothy A. Goudge, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. “But we really didn’t know the extent to which the rivers were organized in large drainage systems at the global scale.”
To gain that understanding, Goudge and postdoctoral fellow Abdallah S. Zaki combined several previously published datasets that charted Mars’ valley networks, lakes and rivers. By merging these sources, they were able to reconstruct the full extent of the drainage systems and calculate their overall size.
