 |
Some
scientists think that Mars could have had floods
relatively recently: maybe only 10 million years
ago. That’s recent in geologic terms:
Mars is probably over 4 billion years old.
|
|
At
their peak these floods may have carried 50,000
times as much water as the Amazon river on Earth. |
|
The landing
site for the first MER rover is Gusev crater. It is believed to
have once been a crater lake. The channel that fed it is half a
mile deep and 500 miles long. |
|
Where’s
the water now? Some of it’s in the polar ice caps. But we
now know that there’s a lot of ice buried under the ground:
at least enough to fill Lake Michigan twice over. But right now
we can only detect water a few feet underground, so there could
be much more. |
