Mars Tsunamis

Scientists claimed to have found evidence of ancient tsunamis on Mars.

15:21 20 May 2016

A US-led team believed to have found evidence of huge tsunamis having once swept across the surface of Mars. They have shown satellite data that suggests a major distribution of sediments over a large region at the edge of the planet’s northern lowlands.

 

The team argues that the giant waves could have been triggered by an asteroid or comet strike that occurred more than three billion years ago when the planet was wetter and warmer.

 

Alexis Palmero Rodriguez from the Planetary Science Institute in Tuscon, Arizona, said: "Clearly, it's one of the implications of this work: to have tsunamis, you must have an ocean," 

 

"So, we think this is going to remove a lot of the uncertainty that surrounds the ocean hypothesis. Features that have in the past been interpreted as relating to an ocean have been controversial; they can be explained by several, alternative processes. But the features we are describing - such as up-slope flows including large boulders - can only be explained in terms of tsunami waves.”

 

Meanwhile, co-author Kenneth Tanaka of the US Geological Survey, added: "[The] large expanse of currently documented tsunami inundation is but a portion of what occurred along the margin of the Martian northern plains-filling ocean," 

 

"Tsunami-related features along other parts of the ocean margin, and potentially other smaller former bodies of water, remain to be identified, mapped and studied in detail."