Mile-high mountains on Mars sculpted by wind, climate change
If you give the wind enough time and enough sand, it can move mountains, new research suggests.
A new study published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters shows that the huge mounds of Martian dirt may have been carved by Martian winds over the course of billions of years.
"On Mars there are no plate tectonics, and there’s no liquid water, so you don’t have anything to overprint that signature and over billions of years you get these mounds, which speaks to how much geomorphic change you can really instigate with just wind," co-author of the study Mackenzie Day said in a statement.
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"Wind could never do this on Earth because water acts so much faster, and tectonics act so much faster."
Spacecraft at Mars have seen these mounds of dirt, which pile in craters, since NASA's Viking missions in the 1970s.
More recently, NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring Mount Sharp -- a 3-mile-high mound in Mars' Gale Crater. The rover discovered that thick mounds are made of sedimentary rock, with the bottom layers transported to craters by water millions of years ago.
The tops of the mounds were then crafted by winds moving material to other parts of the planet, according to the new study.
“There’s been a theory out there that these mounds formed from billions of years of wind erosion, but no one had ever tested that before,” Day added.
For this study, Day and her fellow authors tested that idea by creating a small crater filled with moist sand and placing it in a wind tunnel, mimicking the environment during the Martian epoch that saw the world change from cool and wet to cold and dry.
The scientists then tracked how the wind moved the material in the mock crater.
What the researchers saw in the wind tunnel looked like the Martian mounds and craters, according to the study.
Researchers continue to piece together the Martian past in order to figure out if the red planet may once have hosted life.
Scientists know that Mars used to be warm and wet based on collected during other missions to the red planet. Curiosity, for example, found that the Gale crater once had the conditions to support life, and there may have been long-lived lakes on the world too.
NASA's MAVEN mission even figured out how the planet likely lost its atmosphere to space thanks to the sun's wind.
Mars' climate changed as the solar wind ripped away much of its atmosphere after its magnetic field disappeared about 4.2 billion years ago, according to recent estimates.
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Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
