Rain and floods have shaped the Earth's surface for millions of years. Even today the world is still being transformed by weather and climate, especially in rain and floodwater. For many years scientists have speculated that Mars may also have experienced the same way of formation as the Earth does.
Forming some of the great canyons on Earth have long been thought to have required much water. Now though geoscience researchers Isaac Larsen of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Michael Lamb of the California Institute of Technology say that canyons may have been formed with less water, according to Science Daily. This is critical in analyzing how the canyons of Mars may have been formed.
To show this Larsen and Lamb have created a model, using the channeled scablands from Washington State for it. The area has been chosen since it has deep canyons carved from basalt bedrock much like on Mars, as the UMassAmherst site reports. Channels in the scablands measure as deep as 200 meters and as wide as 5 km.
Both researchers say that floodwater slowly cut into the bedrock of the scablands. Previously it was thought that a large amount of floodwater came to it and then began to cut into the basalt bedrock as water receded. Numerical models that they have used showed how much water could have cut through Moses Coulee, which had been formed when an ice dam on Lake Missoula broke more than 15,000 years ago.
The model they have created helps to explain how canyons on Mars could have been created. Larsen said that low-magnitude flooding could be the factor for this.
"There are very similar but larger canyons on the surface of Mars," Larsen said. He said that the canyons might be bigger than that found here on Earth, but they look similar. These might have likely been created by the same forces that shaped Earth's canyons, ne surmised.
Recently also, Europe has a probe about to land on Mars.
