Liquid Water on Mars Just 200,000 Years Ago?

This news item is just in and seems to point to liquid water having shaped parts of the martian surface in recent history. A swedish research team from Gothenburg University compared a young crater on Mars with erosional features on the Svalbard Islands on Earth.

Water on Mars 200,000 years ago

Water flowed on the surface of Mars as recently as 200,000 years ago, new research suggests.

A young crater in the planet's southern hemisphere contains well-preserved gullies and sediment deposits thought to have been formed by water. Scientists studying the crater estimated it to be no more than about 200,000 years old, so the water features must have appeared since then.

The crater formed long after the most recent proposed ice age on Mars, which ended some 400,000 years ago.

Lead scientist Dr Andreas Johnsson, from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, said: "Gullies are common on Mars but the ones which have been studied previously are older, and the sediments where they have formed are associated with the most recent ice age (...)

Features characteristic of debris flows on Earth caused by material being carried and then deposited by fast-moving water were seen in the crater. The Martian landforms were compared with known debris flows on the Norwegian Svalbard islands in the Arctic Ocean

(...)

I don't know whether or not such erosional activities by means of liquid water have ever been associated with recent geological history on Mars, but this certainly sounds interesting (and new) to me. Thought this is probably worth posting about and look forward to your thoughts on this ...


Sources & Links
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1. Source Article: Daily Mail
2. Source Article: Headlines & Global News
3. Source Article: Belfast Telegraph
4. Science Direct (Abstract)

All images posted in this thread: Courtesy by NASA

a reply to: jeep3r

GREAT FIND! Thanks for sharing this news Jeep3r.
I've already said that in my humble opinion the water on Mars disappeared more recently than billions of years ago....
S&F.

a reply to: jeep3r
Great start to a post...but how about water there right now?? Check out Marsanomalieresearch web site for more than a few pictures to give you thoughts the water may be there right now. good hunting

a reply to: jeep3r

I thought the seasonal water flow has already confirmed that there is water not far under the surface in many areas of Mars. But this is a good find, and good scientific analysis to prove the point further. Thanks for carrying the water for us once again.

originally posted by: nomickeyshere
a reply to: jeep3r
Great start to a post...but how about water there right now?? Check out Marsanomalieresearch web site for more than a few pictures to give you thoughts the water may be there right now. good hunting

Today, well ... seasonal streaks of water that quickly boil away? Probably yes ... and therefore underground water, too. Apart from that, we've got CO2 ice caps at the poles & occasionally subsurface water ice in the northern & southern hemispheres, add in occasional clouds of water ice.

What these guys are looking into, though, are large reservoirs of flowing liquid water on the surface, that passed through long enough to shape said erosional features into the rocks. All in all, I think Mars never disappoints and keeps surprising us, doesn't it?

a reply to: jeep3r

If this could be confirmed with other observations then it could be a game changer re life on Mars although this should be born in mind ....

The study crater is situated in the mid-latitudes of the Martian southern hemisphere and superimposed on the "rampart ejecta" of a nearby larger crater.

Rampart ejecta, which display flower-like features, are believed to be the result of a meteor impact on wet or icy ground.

The scientists first thought the recent water flow features had come from preserved ice within the rampart ejecta.

I hope this can be shown to be true but my hopes aren't high, it would mean that Mars still had an atmosphere thick enough to maintain liquid water 200,000 Years ago and that seems a bit too recent to be true.

Shame the reasearch paper isn't available to the public for free. For one thing, I'd like to know the coordinates of that crater, so that I could look it up in Google Earth and in HiRISE images.

But yeah, an interesting proposition, and major news if it's true.

By the way, I didn't know Mars had an ice age.

I wonder if mars is linked to the intervention theory

It's a none brainer that Mars once held water and this life, however the timeline was always the question

200,000 is literally a blink on an eye and very recently in terms of the age of the universe galaxy etc

There is water currently on mars, along with forests. Just because they avoid all the good areas to land and choose the desert, doesn't mean the planet hasn't been bouncing back. But the oceans seem to be gone.

www.marsanomalyresearch.com...
WATER EVIDENCE DIRECTORY

NASA does a lot of photoshopping.

originally posted by: Unity_99
NASA does a lot of photoshopping.

And conspiracy theorists don't?

Please show me the MRO pictures of forests on Mars.

Looking at "marsanomalyresearch", it seems they see water where there's just smooth dust/sand planes surrounded by rocky terrain, or sand flows. Need to try harder than that.

originally posted by: wildespace
Shame the reasearch paper isn't available to the public for free. For one thing, I'd like to know the coordinates of that crater, so that I could look it up in Google Earth and in HiRISE images.

I sifted through various articles to see if some of the news sites perhaps went beyond quoting the abstract summary, hoping that the name of the crater was revealed somewhere, but to no avail.

I'm not expecting anybody on here to have access to EBSCO journals, but that would be a way to access the paper and perhaps reveal the location details. The article has been published in the Icarus Journal, Volume 235, pages 37-54. It's indeed a pity that some of the full journal articles are locked away behind a paywall ...

a reply to: Unity_99

Something like this...

Fountain, Lake and Dam... (Color added. Notice the transparency of the "sands"...)

originally posted by: Arken
a reply to: Unity_99

Something like this...

Fountain, Lake and Dam... (Color added. Notice the transparency of the "sands"...)

I tried finding that location in Google Mars, but to no avail. Does the "O" in the coordinates mean "East"?

What does the location look like from an oblique point of view? I bet any illusion of a dam / fountain would be destroyed. There might also be a colour image from HiRISE, and if it shows the "lake" having regular yellowish/reddish colour, then it's not a lake of water at all.