When Christopher Columbus and his crew embarked on La Pinta La Niña and La Santa María they had no idea of the immense distance to travel that awaited them ahead. Thousands of kilometers of crossing until arriving at what later came to be called, “the new world”. Well, now these scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt (Maryland, USA) have certified that Mars was covered by a surface greater than that of the Atlantic Ocean on our planet . And that the one that in the end Columbus had to travel in his boats.
The discovery has been made possible thanks to several state-of-the-art instruments. On the one hand the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) together with the instruments of the WM Keck Observatory, and on the other the Infrared Telescope of NASA. Data on the composition of the red planet’s atmosphere have been collected for about six years. Basically two essential forms have been studied: H2O, water as we usually understand it, and HDO, or semi-heavy water, a natural variation in which a hydrogen atom is replaced by deuterium, a heavier compound.
HDO is heavier so it is not so easy that it is lost to space by evaporation . Thus, the greater the loss of water from the planet, the greater the ratio of HDO to H2O will be in the remaining water. By comparing the proportion of HDO and that of H2O, scientists have been able to measure how much the proportion of HDO has increased, thus determining how much water has escaped into space. This allows, in turn, to estimate the amount of water that could have been on Mars thousands of years ago.
And the results have been amazing. According to scientists, about 4,000 million years ago, the planet would have had enough water to cover its entire surface with a liquid layer about 140 meters deep. However, the most likely thing is that the liquid would end up accumulating and forming an ocean that would have occupied almost half of the northern hemisphere of Mars, reaching, in some regions, depths greater than 1.6 kilometers.
“Our study provides a solid estimate of how much water Mars could have , determining how much water was lost into space,” says Gerónimo Villanueva, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and author. main of the new article. ” With this work, we can better understand the history of water on Mars .”
