Eruption turned Mars – scientists – TODAY

The planet Mars. Photo: NASA

The French scientists at the Mars Simulation Development made a unique discovery. As it turned out, about 3.5 billion years ago the Red planet’s axis shifted by a quarter as a result of powerful volcanic eruption. This event could lead to the loss of the planet’s atmosphere.

As stated in an article published in the journal Nature, experts from the University-Saclay in Paris in Orsay (France) conducted a computer simulation of the plateau Tharsis, whose diameter is about five thousands of kilometers thick – about 12 kilometers, and weight – about a billion billion tons. The attention of scientists has attracted a network of river beds far from the plateau, once flowing into the ocean that covered the northern hemisphere of the Red Planet.

According to the researchers, 3.5 billion years ago, these rivers have been flowing through the Tharsis, and not upwards, and vice versa. This led scientists to believe that the largest geological structure of Mars and its volcanoes may have formed already after the Red Planet river dried up.

The emergence of Tharsis, whose mass is only 70 times smaller than the Moon , was to radically reconstruct the topography of Mars and cause large-scale changes in his appearance, completely hiding what looked like the Red planet in the past. Using computer modeling, scientists were able to determine that the axis of Mars had to shift to 20-25 degrees after the appearance of Tharsis, resulting in the former tropics and the equator of the Red Planet have been displaced in the southern hemisphere, and its pole “moved” in the temperate regions.

“To be more precise, in fact, moved not the axis of the planet and its crust and mantle, which literally” turned “around Mars kernel under the weight of” hump “Tharsis. This rotation axis explains several mysteries Mars – why water reserves are concentrated not on the poles, and in the temperate zones of the Southern and Northern hemispheres, then, why the Martian rivers are located in a narrow band in the “tropics” in the southern hemisphere, and why Tharsis is located on the equator “- says study co-author Francois costar from the University of Paris-Saclay in Orsay.

According to the scientists, the appearance of a volcanic plateau Tharsis, where the highest mountain of the solar system, a volcano Olympus, has led to the fact that the Martian axis literally It shifted to 20-25 degrees about 3.5 billion years ago, and its crust and mantle began to revolve around the nucleus.

 

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