Ancient Mars Had an Ocean, Scientists Say

Morgan Frayne
Mrs. McClellan
Core Earth Science
March 8, 2015
Current Events

Ancient Mars Had an Ocean, Scientists Say

Since 2009, the government-run administration NASA has been observing Mars in effort to prove whether Mars ever had an ocean. Recently, they came across overwhelming evidence that proves this theory highly true. Dr. Mumma and Geronimo Villanueva analyzed a meteorite from the planet and measured two forms of water that are abundant in the Martian atmosphere. One was just plain, old-fashioned H2O, and the other is a marginally denser water. Its called HDO, and it’s almost exactly the same except there is a neutron in the nucleus of one of the Hydrogen atoms. This type of Hydrogen atom is called Deuterium. From the meteorite they also gathered that Mars’s atmosphere contains eight times more Deuterium than Earth - which gives us the information we need to calculate about how much water Mars obtained in its aquatic hayday. According to this data, Mars had about enough water on it to cover the entire planet in 137 meters of water. They claim that the ocean was about the size of the Arctic Ocean, taking up about 19% of the planet’s surface area. From what scientists at NASA already know about Mars, they guessed that this ocean would have been in the northern hemisphere of the planet, being that this area is lower. Up until 2013, scientists had absolutely no visible evidence of water ever having been there; no sea cliffs or shorelines. But, recently Michael Lamb - a postdoctoral student at the California Institute of Technology, observed what he believes to be a channel system that begins in the southern hemisphere of Mars and empties into the north. Although, this has yet to be validated with sufficient evidence to be considered factually legitimate.

This new evidence just makes the possibility of life on Mars more likely. NASA now has enough information about the conditions on Mars to make a hypothesis about the possibility of organisms thriving or having thrived on the planet. If they take it a step further, and possibly search for evidence of organisms and come up with something, this discovery would be earth shattering! Martians would no longer be the stuff of tall tales - and everyone would want to know about it.

This article was an easy read and indisputably sufficient evidence to back up its claims. Not only that but it broke down the science remarkably well; I understood perfectly well what the author was saying and could easily process the information that was being discussed- regardless of how scientist-y the language was. However, I felt that the author jumped around too much. The information went in the wrong order - from specific to broad, as opposed to vice versa which properly introduces the reader to the topic and content. Not only this but the author included a couple points that although were slightly tied to the topic, were not relevant or important to the point that was being proven. All in all, I found this article to be extremely informative and interesting.

Kaufman, Marc. "Ancient Mars Had an Ocean, Scientists Say." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 5 Mar. 2015. Web. 8 Mar. 2015. <www.nytimes.com%2F2015%2F03%2F06%2Fscience%2Fmars-had-an-ocean-scientists-say-pointing-to-new-data.html%3Fref%3Dscience>.