Occasionally, scientific discoveries come from unanticipated exploration. Imagine that roughly, in this case a rock, a big rock, hits the surface of Mars with an impact so powerful that surface material flies away and that is fast enough to escape the planet's gravity pull. By an astrophysical coincidence, this fast-moving pile of stone rubble crosses Earth's orbit. Some of its material enters the Earth's atmosphere, and even endures being burned up. Most mysterious part, that these tired and travel-stained meteorites do not land in the ocean, since water is the most area covering of our planet's surface, but instead go to ground somewhere in Africa.
Martian Rocks Has Been In Geologist List To Search
As luck would have it, scientists have been discovering meteor rocks since 2012, some rocks dated one million years after it departed from the planet. The lucky astrologers choose 'Northwest Africa 7635' to be the rock's name. Now, this piece of wandering Martian rock can tell us specifically about its homeland.
Per a report by a team of geologists, led by Tom Lapen of the University of Houston, Texas, Northwest Africa 7635 is one of eleven Martian meteor rocks that have been found on Earth. All the other meteorites that have been found, share the same chemical composition and expulsion time, per their study.
"We understand that they came from a comparable volcanic source," Lapen said. "Given that they also have the same discharge time, we can conclude that these come from the same volcano from Mars."
The Evidence Shows Approximately Two Billion Years Of Active Martian Volcanoes
But, these pieces of meteor rocks were formed at a different period. Early studies of Martian meteorites comprising of volcanic mineral known as 'shergottite' indicated that the rock was between 327-600 million years old. However, after examining Northwest Africa 7635, Lapen and his colleagues determined that this is a much older specimen, forming about 2.4 billion years ago. This makes Martian mountains some of the longest-lived volcanos in the solar system.
The report of the discovery, published in Science Advances, claims that the data delivers new insight into the history of volcanic activity on Mars.
Mars is not an amateur in the scenery of interplanetary records. Olympus Mons, the planet's largest volcano, has a height of 13 to 17 miles, liable on the method of calculation, making it twice or three times as high as Earth's highest volcanic mountain, Mauna Kea, which, when measured from its underwater beginnings to its snowy top, is approximately 6.25 miles.
