Mars a hopeless fall – therefore the planet lost its water

Why did the red planet lose its ocean? A new study suggests that the dimension made Mars a hopeless case.

Science has known that Mars was once covered by an ocean. NASA’s rovers Curiosity and Perseverance have sent pictures of the tracks after the water in the form of canals and river valleys, but we have not come closer to an explanation as to why it disappeared.

The theories are many, and in a new study, Washington University in St. Louis now his own. The researchers suggest that there is a limit to how small a rocky planet can be to retain enough water to be habitable and sustain tectonic plates. Mars simply has too small a volume. It writes the university in one press release.

To investigate the presence of volatile substances on various planetary bodies, the research group has looked at stable isotopes of potassium. It is an element which in itself is volatile but which can act as a trace element for even more volatile things such as water. They measured isotopes of potassium in 20 March meteorites that were allowed to represent an average of the planet’s composition.

– Mars meteorites have an age ranging from several hundred million years to four million years, and have thus captured the evolution around Mars volatile substances. By measuring the isotopes of moderately volatile substances, such as potassium, we can make assumptions about the degree of loss of volatile substances in planets with large masses and compare this with other bodies in the solar system, says Kun Wang, who is the lead author of the study.