Last year in early December, Science published an article in which the authors detailed a powerful catastrophe that struck Mars about billions of years ago. Although Mars as we see it today is an arid planet and it's hard to imagine life on it, astronomers began to suspect decades ago that Mars might have been a completely different look in the distant past.
In 1972, the automated Mars rover Mars 9 found topographical traces near the equator that looked like waterways left behind after a flood. To verify whether Mars was once covered by oceans in ancient times, the Americans decided to send landing modules to the region and conduct a series of scientific studies.
The automated Viking 1 rover landed there in 1976, but it did not find the relatively flat landscape that was supposed to have been created after being submerged. Instead, scientists on Earth who control the lander have received a large number of photographs of boulders.
The origin of these stones has long been a mystery. Although hypotheses about this issue have been raised from time to time, there is no way to confirm them. In 2016, a team of scientists hypothesized that the rocks captured by Viking 1's cameras were thrown during a very powerful tsunami that occurred 3.4 billion years ago.
Huge bodies of water can undoubtedly carry stones from one area of the Martian surface to another, but such huge waves would not be created on flat ground.
The authors of the idea believe that the most likely cause is that Mars collided with an asteroid or comet. This impact should leave a huge impact crater. Despite the devastating effects of local natural forces, some traces remain on Mars. Several researchers, in collaboration with other scientists, began searching for signs of such an impact.
By analyzing images of the planet's surface near the Viking 1 landing site, scientists found an impact crater 900 kilometers from the landing site. The crater appears to be quite large and appears to have been caused by an asteroid, enough to trigger a huge tsunami. The crater is known as "Paul Crater" and is named after the illustrious science fiction writer Frederick Paul.
The crater has a diameter of about 110 km. Based on its location as well as local mountain rocks, the age of the crater coincides perfectly with the declared timing of the impact. It is presumed that about 3.4 billion years ago, this region on Mars had a deep ocean. Therefore, an asteroid or comet hitting this point can cause the same large tsunami.
The researchers used computer simulations to simulate several different scenarios of the disaster. The ultimate goal is to determine what kind of impact was capable of creating an impact crater and creating a huge wave that carried the rocks to the Viking 1 landing site.
It turned out that either an asteroid with a diameter of 9 kilometers hit a hard surface, or an asteroid 3 kilometers in size hit a loose surface. Further geological data analysis showed that the second scenario was more likely. In this case, when the asteroid hits Mars, the energy released is equivalent to the energy of a 500,000-ton nuclear bomb explosion, forming a wave about 250 meters high, and this huge wave rushes towards the Martian land.
It's almost the same scene of an event that happened on Earth 66 million years ago. At that time, a huge meteorite fell on the coast near the Yucatan Peninsula. It left a crater with a diameter of 110 kilometers and a depth of several hundred meters. It also triggered a huge tsunami up to 200 meters high. As a result of that catastrophe, the dinosaurs on Earth went extinct.
On Mars, it is likely that there were no casualties. Never. Although our exploration of Mars is becoming more normal, we still know very little about Mars. Let's look forward to the news from there. Perhaps in the near future, we will learn that we are not alone in the universe.