Was Mars covered in Ice Sheets? Was MARS a White Planet?

Is life on Mars possible? Will Mars become a second home for human life? The answers to these questions are still not clear. Scientists and Researchers are working on finding out the answers to the mysteries that if there is any chance ever for life to exist on Mars.

Researches carried out in the past to find about life on Mars showed that there were traces of water on Mars made the possibility of the existence of life on Mars. Ever since that, the interest of researchers finding of life existence on Mars accelerated.

Red Planet or White Planet?

On the quest about life on Mars, there are some recent developments. The researchers had found out that there were ice sheets and not flowing water or rivers on Mars. It has raised another question that “Was Mars White Planet?”  The well-known red planet maybe once covered with sheets of ice similar to the Arctic on Earth.

Ice Sheets on Mars

The network of valleys spotted on Mars led to the possibility of water there. The water available on Mars thought as in the form of flowing rivers and oceans. It led to the belief that the planet was wet and warm with rainfall. But the latest study has discovered that the water on Mars exists similarly as in the case of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

The glacial ice covering the meltwater beneath it suggests the possibility of ancient alien life existence. The researchers suggest that ice sheets protect the water and block solar radiation to reach the Martian surface. Researchers have analyzed thousands of different valleys before giving their verdicts.

After investigating the valleys, the Martian valleys having similar characteristics was done. It helped the research team to find out the proper reasons that may have given rise to these valleys.

The researchers have developed and used unique technologies to investigate these Martian valleys. The similarities of these valleys and the Island in the Canadian Arctic helped motivated the researchers to carry out this comparative study.

The team determined that valleys possess similar characteristics, with only a small number of the valley networks appearing as if they had been formed by surface water erosion. Instead, they seem to have come about as a result of erosion from water draining below an ancient ice sheet.

Comments by Grau Galofre

“There are hundreds of valleys on Mars, and they look very different from each other. If you look at Earth from a satellite, you see a lot of valleys: some of them made by rivers, some made by glaciers, some made by other processes, and each type has a distinctive shape.”

“Mars is similar, in that valleys look very different from each other, suggesting that many processes were at play to carve them.”

“Climate modeling predicts that Mars’ ancient climate was much cooler during the time of valley network formation,” said Galofre.

“We tried to put everything together and bring up a hypothesis that channels and valleys networks can form under ice sheets, as part of the drainage system that forms naturally under an ice sheet when there’s water accumulated at the base.”