<div align="center">How Groundwater Shaped Mars</div> Original Story Crusty, dusty and rusty describes the Mars of today. Surface features of the Red Planet, however, hint at a watery past where torrents of groundwater carved out deep canyons, formed sweeping fans of sediment and cemented together huge fault lines. "Groundwater probably played a major role in shaping many of the things we see on the Martian surface," said George Postma, a sedimentologist at UtrechtUniversity in the Netherlands. Postma collaborated with Virginia Tech's Erin Kraal and others to recreate Mars' fan-like sediment deposits with a scale model. The group detailed their findings in a recent issue of the journal Nature. A separate new study by Allan Treiman, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, details the role of groundwater in depositing minerals in rocky Martian crevices. Rapid release Scientists think a massive ocean once covered one-third of Mars, and recent photographs suggest that pockets of water may still be hidden beneath the planet's surface. Water is crucial for life as we know it, so signs of underground water now — and more extensive amounts of water in the past — both suggest Mars was or might still be habitable, at least to microorganisms. Postma said such reservoirs of water probably carved out canyons, rapidly depositing step-like layers of sediment in Martian impact craters across the planet. "When we examined photographs of Mars, we saw that some deltas had steps of material," Postma told SPACE.com. He noted that such formations are seen on Earth only where water rapidly deposits delta sediment, such as parts of the Sahara Desert's Lake Chad. "Based on our models, these structures might have been caused by catastrophic events that filled the craters in one go," he said. Instead of taking millions of years to form, Postma said the fans probably formed in decades. Ancient torrents of water spilling out of Martian ground with the output of the Mississippi River, for example, could have formed some of the dozen step-like sediment fans the researchers observed in about 13 years. "Another puzzling feature is that you don't see a drainage network along the crater's side," Postma said — yet another clue that fans' formations were rapid and not the product of rainy runoff. "Craters are thought to be very porous, so the water can sink through. Another possibility is that the water just evaporated into the Martian atmosphere." Mineral cement In Valles Marineris, where about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) of 6-mile-deep (10-kilometers) chasms dwarfing the Grand Canyon stretch over Mars, Treiman thinks he has located more evidence of groundwater at work. "Groundwater is a crucial reservoir in Mars's global water cycle and plays an important role in ... alteration of bedrock," Treiman writes in his study, detailed yesterday in the journal Nature Geoscience. The Valles Marineris canyons formed when massive slabs of rock both lifted up and sunk, creating fault lines in the process. Spacecraft imagery of the landscape shows the crevices as ridges, which Treiman thinks were filled with mineral-rich groundwater between 3.5 billion and 1.8 billion years ago. "This interpretation implies that liquid water was stable at or near Mars's surface when the fault zones were cemented," Treiman said, noting that only a "warm wet" climate on Mars could have made the deposits possible. "The presence of liquid water is important in current ideas of Mars's history," Treiman said, "and central to Mars's potential for life."
wow do you realy think we might one day be able to live on mars? and do you think it will be for good or for bad??
If we can live on mars then the overpopulation will be lessened and it will be a good transportation. Planet to Planet.
One day live on Mars? Let's work through this to an extent. Ehm. No. Honestly think the Human race is going to live long enough that we can develop the technology to even reach Mars? Nobody has come close to landing on Mars, to make the whole population eventually move there is hundreds of years in the future technology wise, and I don't know about you, but I'm not sure Humans have that long left.
There is a very small possibility if they can somehow harness energy from the planet, or use the sun's energy via solar power and then having kind of a 'bubble' type environment which filters in air and heat, etc. but otherwise its too cold and far too barren to be an actual human planet without some HUGE scientific modifications and the chances of you EVER being able to live there is zilch. In terms of landing on mars, we have landed on there with a rover bot, I fail to see exactly why it would be hard to land a spacecraft there, other than the time invested and fuel, etc.
If there's chance in the future that we're people will occupy 2 planets. I hope Mars will not be destroyed.
Well I believe your wrong and heres how it will happen. Atheist will find a way to do it to get away from the christians. End of story lmao!!
Not really, technology now allows us to build up rather than historical occurences of horizontal sprawl. Considering the amount of land which is yet to be inhabited, I'd say overpopulation is temporarily cureable. Also, if a certain group of liberals weren't such tree huggers and animal lovers, then we'd be able to create more livable area.
Or maybe, after we're done with Earth we will move to Mars, and yeah we can also live there. Afterall, we are HUMANS
