Mars was huge ocean but disappeared. What happened? – Politics

NASA

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It’s amazing, but sometime in the so-called period noachijskim – 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago – Mars was so much water that it could cover the entire planet ocean at a depth of 140 m. And so a big ocean on Mars was, however, did not cover the whole planet, but primarily the North Pole. He almost half of the northern hemisphere of Mars – approx. 19 percent. surface of the globe (compared with 17 percent of the Atlantic cover. surface of the Earth) – and reached in some places to a depth of nearly two miles. This was the period of a few hundred million years, not long after the formation of the planet. Scientists from several leading astronomical observatories in the world now have evidence that it did.

Unfortunately, today, Mars is barren and cold desert with a trace atmosphere. It seems completely dead – and rather this is – and the water exists only in the form of ice, mainly in the polar caps, below and in small amounts in the atmosphere. What happened?

Mars is too small to produce their own persistent magnetic field, and thus the magnetosphere which protects the planet from the solar wind particles. Earth and some of the planets of the solar system have a magnetosphere. They curve of the solar wind particles and form a protective barrier against them. Mars produced magnetosphere, therefore, solar particles, particles hitting the atmosphere, taking them to high energy. This energy allowed atmospheric particles escape into space – as a result of the red planet was almost completely devoid of atmosphere. Without it, liquid water on Mars could not keep. Also drifted into space.

Now, scientists working at the European Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Keck Observatory and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii calculated how big was the original ocean on Mars, it was a disaster. Is investigated by analyzing the traces of water in the atmospheric residue frail over the north pole of Mars. Now found that traces of water in the Martian atmosphere traced to a large surplus of deuterium, which is that there is quite a lot of so-called. heavy water containing no two hydrogen atoms, such as ordinary water, but one hydrogen and one deuterium isotope of hydrogen which is.

in the earth’s oceans value ordinary water molecules (H2O) to severe (HDO) is 3200 to 1. In today’s current Martian water over the North Pole deuterium is eight times more.

Water from heavy deuterium was considered not from Mars into space as easily as ordinary water, so a lot of it is still there. By analyzing how much is left in the footsteps of deuterium Martian water, the researchers were able to estimate how much water was even on Mars. And it was in the original ocean approx. 20 million km cubic. That’s more than the Arctic Ocean in the Earth.

Unfortunately, when almost ceased to exist atmosphere too soon evaporate water, and Mars significantly cooled down, frozen and dry. Despite this, some life on it could be born during noachijskim and can even survive somewhere in trace amounts. And it is those traces, former or still present life on Mars is still looking.

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The results of these tests are presented in the latest issue of the journal “Science” dated March 5 2015.