NASA has revealed that there was a point in time when the surface of Mars was almost a quarter covered with water. According to scientist from the space agency, the ocean was so large it had a depth of one mile. News is emanating from the Goddard Space Center approximately 13% of that Ocean can still be found on the planet today. This is contained in the polar ice caps. The remaining 13% are remnants of the amount of water that did not evaporate into space upon the planet’s atmosphere vanishing.
Scientists at NASA’s Space center including Geronimo Villanueva made this astonishing disclosure after employing the use of infrared beams. These infrared beams were used to construct a virtual map of water molecules from the amount of water currently on the planet’s surface. The remaining water is only possible because of what is left of Mars’ atmosphere.
It was already a known fact that the red planet once contained water. This new revelation, however, puts a longer time frame on how long the planet has had water for. To put this in perspective, this basic ocean contained more water than that of our own blue marble’s Arctic Ocean. Scientists involved in the study has gone as far as inferring that approximately 4.3 billion years ago Mars had enough water that would have covered the whole surface.
It was also revealed that this liquid layer would have been approximately 450 feet in depth. More intriguing is that the depths in various areas could have been as deep as over one mile. A possible location of this ocean would have been approximately half of the red planet’s northern hemisphere.
The news is fascinating, especially given the fact that the scientists involved in the research are confident in their findings. They believe that it gives them a concrete estimate of what the makeup of the planet’s water world once was.