Chinese Rover Reveals Mars Used To Have Some Beautiful Beaches
Based on evidence beamed back to Earth from the Zhurong rover, scientists speculate that there were once sandy beaches along the shoreline of an extinct ocean called Deuteronilus. But don't pack your board bag and spacesuit just yet. You're going to have to go back in time approximately 3.5 to 4 billion years.
It's believed that in the very distant past Mars had a more hospitable atmosphere with warmer temperatures that allowed for liquid water on the surface. Scientists point to this a a recipe for life. Surfers point to it as a recipe for surf. Heck, there could have even been Martian locals, swaying palm trees and some alien version of Great White Sharks, who knows?!
The rover, which roamed northern Mars from 2021 to 2022, used ground-penetrating radar imaging technology to take a peak under the surface of the planet, and what it found looks a lot like beaches similar to those found on Earth. It's believed that billions of years ago rivers fed into the Martian sea, creating the same kind of coastal geography and topography found here - sand dunes, slopes leading to a shoreline, etc. It's believe there was also likely some form of wave action thanks to tides and winds.
"The Martian surface has changed dramatically over 3.5 billion years, but by using ground-penetrating radar we found direct evidence of coastal deposits that weren't visible from the surface," Hai Liu, a planetary scientist at Guangzhou University and member of the Chinese team that worked on the mission, said in a news report.
"The beaches would have been formed by similar processes to those on Earth - waves and tides," Liu adds.
Could an interstellar real estate arms race between China and the U.S. be that far off? China continues to not only explore the deepest reaches of our solar system, but has also been applying a government-funded, full-court press to break into surfing. They sent their first athlete to the Olympics in Tahiti last summer, and they've been entertaining a takeover of wave-rich Taiwan for a minute now.
But the President of the United States has prioritized landing humans on Mars before his term is up in 2028. Along with his other cosmic ideas, he sees it as imperative that the U.S. 'pursue our manifest destiny into the stars."
All of this begs the question, if a wave breaks on Mars and nobody's there to ride it, did it ever even break at all?
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