Photo credit: ESO / M. Kornmesser / N. Risinger via Engadget
Around 66 million years ago, a giant asteroid hurtled into Earth and caused a 93 mile-wide crater in what is now the Gulf of Mexico, while also triggering a 100-metre high mega-tsunami. Now a new study suggests Mars may have suffered a similar fate of a mega-tsunami event 3.7 billion years ago. The researchers observed Mars’ Lomonosov crater, which they think is likely to have been created by a rogue 10 mile-wide space rock, as it closely resembles the marine craters back here on Earth.
If this theory holds true then the research adds weight to the theory Mars once had an ocean, making the Lomonosov crater a great place to search for alien life on Mars. Despite this observation, there is still no concrete proof that Mars once had an ocean billions of years ago, since a lot more data would be required to verify this.
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It was a really large-scale, high speed tsunami. At the very beginning, a crater of 70km in diameter was created by the impact. This expelled a huge volume of water, with wave propagation at 60m/second The initial wave was about 300m in height. After just a few hours, that tsunami wave reached the palaeo-shoreline located at a few hundred km from the impact crater. Finally, due to the Martian ocean filling in that crater, which produced a kind of rebound, there was a second wave propagation,” said Dr Francois Costard.
