Scientists: Volcano “turn” axis of Mars 3.5 billion years ago – Business portal

g on March 3 2016.

The emergence of Tharsis volcanic plateau, where the highest mountain of the solar system, Olympus volcano led to the fact that the axis of Mars literally shifted by 20-25 degrees about 3.5 billion years ago, and its crust and mantle began to revolve around the nucleus. This planetary say in an article published in the journal Nature, reports RIA Novosti.

Today Mars tilted with respect to its orbit at 25 degrees, which roughly corresponds to how much the Earth’s rotation axis is inclined. In contrast to our planet, whose rotation axis is stable, scientists believe that the slope of the Martian axis frequently changed in the past under the influence of its moons, Phobos and Deimos.

Such a “turn” axis, as it is today considered planetary scientists can explain why on the surface of the red planet has a relatively fresh traces of water flows, which can not exist in the current environment.

Francois Costar (Francois Costard) of the University-Saclay in Paris in Orsay (France) his colleagues found that such changes could be caused in the past geological processes in the depths of Mars, studying the structure of the terrain of the red planet and try to restore its image in the past.

It tells costar, the largest geological structures on Mars is the Tharsis plateau, whose diameter is about five thousand kilometers thick – about 12 kilometers, and weight – about a billion billion tons. Not far from the plateau in the southern “half” of Mars, is a network of riverbeds once flowing into the ocean that covered the northern hemisphere of the red planet.

The authors drew attention to the fact that in the Noachian epoch, 3 3,5 billion years ago, these rivers were flowing very strange way – they seem to have ignored the existence of Tharsis and flowed not from the bottom up and top down. This led scientists to believe that the Tharsis and its volcanoes may have formed already after the Mars river dried up.

The emergence of such a large geological structure, whose mass is only 70 times smaller than the Moon, should it was radically rebuild the topography of Mars and cause large-scale changes in his appearance, completely hiding from us what looked like red planet in the past. Costar and his colleagues attempted to “restore” the image of ancient Mars, “by removing the” Tharsis exact virtual copy of the red planet, and then get a modern image, adding it back.

This “terramorphing” led to dramatic consequences – is 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, it moved no axis of the planet and its crust and mantle, which literally “turned” around Mars kernel under the weight of “hump” Tharsis.

Such a rotation axis explains several mysteries of Mars – why water reserves are concentrated not on the poles, and in temperate zones in southern and northern hemispheres, then, why the Martian rivers are located in a narrow band in the “tropics” of the southern hemisphere, and why Tharsis is located on the equator

in addition, this discovery is yet another argument in favor of the “volcanic” origin of rivers and potential of the oceans of Mars – it is likely that they are having the time of birth Tharsis, during its first eruptions of volcanoes, and disappeared shortly before the volcanic activity subsided before “turning axis”.

RIA Novosti