An ocean once covered half of the northern hemisphere of Mars, according to NASA scientists. This makes it far more likely that the red planet was once blue – and teeming with alien life.
The ocean covered more than one fifth of the planet’s surface, making it about as large as the Atlantic Ocean. In total, it held 20 million cubic kilometers of water. That’s a bit more than what is held in the arctic ocean.
NASA unveiled their evidence for the primitive ocean on Thursday, and emerging with that evidence is a wet world with streams, rivers, and lakes soon after it was formed over four and a half billion years ago.
Only ten years ago, scientists believed that the presence of water was more random and erratic, likely in liquid form only occasionally and never in standing oceans.
“A major question has been how much water did Mars actually have when it was young and how did it lose that water?”...
