Go back a mere four billion years, and Mars could have been the perfect destination for a summer holiday.
According to scientists, hidden underneath the red planet is evidence that there were once sandy beaches and a large ocean on its surface.
Data obtained from China’s Zhurong rover indicate that the ocean – known as Deuteronilus – would have existed roughly 3.5 to four billion years ago, a time when Mars had a thicker atmosphere and warmer climate.
The rover, which operated from May 2021 to May 2022, travelled about 1.2 miles (1.9km) on the planet, and detected thick layers of material with properties similar to sand around 35-115ft below the surface.
The sand-like material was all sloped in the same direction and at an angle, similar to beaches on Earth, and spanned for three quarters of a mile, researchers said.
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, said these beaches would have been formed by similar processes to those on Earth – waves and tides.
The discovery could be crucial in finding out if Mars’s surface supported living organisms.
“Shorelines are great locations to look for evidence of past life,” planetary scientist and co-author of the study, Michael Manga of the University of California, Berkeley, said.
“It’s thought that the earliest life on Earth began at locations like this, near the interface of air and shallow water.”
Fellow co-author and Penn State geoscientist, Benjamin Cardenas, added researchers were able to rule out that the structures detected by the rover were ancient rivers or sand dunes.
“Beaches simply fit the observations the best,” he said.
He added: “Dunes tend to come in groups, and these groups produce characteristic patterns not present in these deposits… We also considered ancient rivers, but we rejected that hypothesis for similar reasons based on the patterns we saw in the deposits.”
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A study published last year found evidence suggesting there is a large reservoir of liquid water under the surface of Mars, within fractured igneous rocks.
Any evidence of the reservoir on the surface could have been erased or distorted by billions of years of wind erosion or other geological processes.
That is not the case with these newly found structures, which were preserved over time under material deposited by dust storms, meteorite strikes or volcanic activity.
