Mars Has Flowing Water In The Summer!

Flowing water is the definitive theory for these seasonal, dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks flowing downhill on Mars.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But when looking for E.T., where there’s water, there 's (possibly) life.

So you can imagine how excited scientists were announcing that dark streaks that sometimes appear on Martian slopes are actually flowing water, according to findings published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

NASA announced that during Martian summers, salty liquid water flows down the slopes. That discovery could mean habitable conditions for microbe life on the planet’s cold, dry surface — past or present.

Planetary scientists examined reflected light from images from 2010 and determined they were recently-hydrated salts from Mars' Horowitz crater.

This confirms a longtime theory that dark streak images taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2010 are water.


The steaks are technically called recurring slope lineae and span over 100 meters long and five meters wide.

At the end of last year, a team of eight scientists started analyzing the light reflected from the dark features that only showed up during the Martian summer and disappeared in its winter. This process tells us what minerals make up the surface of planets.

After these mineral salts soak up water, they leave these dark streaks, saidlead author and University of Arizona graduate student Lujendra Ojha.

"There were these stark, linear, narrow features forming" all over the planet, Ojha told Bloomburg Business, "and they were only forming when the temperature was ideal for liquid water."

GIF of the dark streaks on Mars' Newton Crater slopes from McEwen et al. published in 2011. These early images formed the basis for findings published Monday.

Ojha and his colleagues say that the molecular water couldn't be locked in the salts without a recent influx of water. The paper says the conditions are similar to the Atacama Desert in western Latin America whose salt beds are perfect for potential microbes.

The saltiness of the water is key because it keeps the water from freezing over in Mars's cold temperatures.

The paper didn't say exactly where the water came from but offered several possibilities, including water from melting subsurface ice, liquid bubbling up from an aquifer, or water being pulled out of the Martian atmosphere by the salty surface.

We’ve known for years that Mars has had water frozen at the poles and glacier belts, in the atmosphere and more recently in tiny puddles that form at night. The Red Planet also shows topographical scars of ancient water flow, which lead scientists to believe Mars was once warmer and wetter than today.

Main Image Source: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

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