Water may have had a much longer history on Mars than we thought

In this week's Nature paper, scientists calculate that Mars had the conditions for flowing water for a much longer time period than expected, which suggests that life could have had ample time to form there.

By using mathematical models to tilt Mars's surface 20 degrees, an international team of scientists have upended current predictions about the history of water on the Red Planet.

Their findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggest that the climate conditions of young Mars allowed water to flow there for a longer period of time than scientists previously thought, which would have allowed more time for life to form on the planet.

“Generally, the longer you have large volumes of stable water on the planet, the more likely it is for life to arrive,” Isamu Matsuyama, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona who was part of the research team, told The Christian Science Monitor in an interview. “Although, that’s all speculative,” he cautioned.

Read more @ http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0303/Water-may-have-had-a-much-longer-history-on-Mars-than-we-thought


"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~