Written by Samah Labib Saturday, December 9, 2023 01:00 AM A group of scientists discovered a network of polygonal cracks dozens of meters below Utopia Planitia on MarsAt a depth of tens of meters below the Martian equator, there is a large honeycomb-shaped pattern similar to what is found near the frozen poles of the Earth, according to a Space report.
Each crack extends 70 meters (230 feet) – about half a football field – and is bordered by a slurry of ice and clay 30 meters (98 feet) wide. Scientists say the material is likely between 2 billion and 3.5 billion years old. year.
These patterns were spotted in data sent back by the now incommunicado Chinese spacecraft Zhurong, which explored a vast, rugged region north of the Martian equator called Utopia Planitia.
Zhruong moved just over 1 km (0.6 mi) toward Mars’ southern region that year, but even during that short journey, its radar sensed a continuous pattern of 15 buried polygons, suggesting there may be more waiting.
Similar patterns are known to form on Earth only in Greenland, Iceland and Antarctica when a sharp drop in temperatures caused by seasonal changes causes the Earth to break, said study lead author Li Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The ice and mud that fills these cracks sometimes prevents them from healing, eventually causing the surface to crack more. A similar process on Mars, about 2 billion to 3.5 billion years ago, would have led to the newly discovered cracks, which are tens of meters larger. From any cracks on our planet. “These polygons are huge,” Zhang said.
In short, this discovery provides new evidence that the Red Planet once hosted water and a climate friendly to life as we know it.
Confusingly, this pattern also suggests that the tropics on Mars were cold enough to cause cracks similar to those seen near Earth’s ice pole.
This mystery can be answered by an existing (but unproven) theory suggesting that Mars was once tilted on its axis much more than it is today – up to forty degrees or more – about 5 million years ago.
“Such a highly skewed scenario muddies the waters between thinking of polar regions as cold and low-latitude regions as warm,” Zhang said.
