Water Flow on Mars Shifted Pebbles Down 50-km, Says Study

NASA’s Curiosity rover found a collection of smooth pebbles in Gale Crater on Mars, and a recent study of the rocks suggests that they were smoothed by traveling for miles in flowing water.

Study co-author Gábor Domokos, an applied mathematician at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, expressed in a statement today (Oct. 13) that an object’s shape can describe a lot. All the same, the scientists could not help but take an interest in these peculiar pebbles documented by Curiosity.

Applying further calculations to the basalt material found on Mars, they arrived at the calculation that the pebbles had travelled an estimated 50 km from their source.

The findings are published in the Nature Communications journal and stand for the first method to deduct how far along pebbles are transported simply by using their shape.

A current examine has discovered that these Martian rocks rolled within the river for a substantial period of time, a discovery that ought to assist NASA researchers to reconstruct the surroundings of historical Mars and decide the planet’s former potential to help residing organisms. Since, then Curiosity has been searching signs of water on the planet.

A new study suggests that Mars, which is now a cold and dry planet, had rivers flowing a few three billion years ago.

Working with the only measurement at hand, that is the Martian pebbles’ shape, Gabor Domokos found the formula that determines how two particles influence each other regardless of the environment they are in or their composition.

“The Martian pebbles traveled roughly 30 miles from their source, providing additional evidence for the idea that Mars once had an extensive river system, conditions that could support life”, the scientists argue in a report detailing their work.

The sedimentary deposits contained rounded particles, millimetres to centimetres in diameter, that were mixed with sand to form conglomerates. A week before, researchers said that the Gale Crater must have contained lakes that rose and fell for millions of years.

“So we started by asking the question how much of the transport history of a pebble can we deduce by its shape alone?”

Professor Jerolmack and colleagues carried out simulated erosion experiments using limestone rocks tumbled around inside a barrel to determine the exact amount of abrasion pebbles would be subjected to as they are transported down rivers or streams over time. Formerly, the investigators examined the form of the Martian pebbles to project the sum of mass each lost because of erosion.

“We could really start piecing together the plumbing of this river system on Mars”, Jerolmack said.

In short, they have calculated the length of a portion of the ancient Martian river by looking at the pebbles photographed by the Curiosity land rover.

The researchers also studied rocks in an alluvial fan – the fan-shaped deposit of sediment that shapes up as a stream flows – at the entrance of a canyon in New Mexico. Linking the resulting shape with the lost mass of the rock or pebble and its transportation history becomes the trickier part. They stated that they observed large and angular rock formations that seemed to collapse from the headwater walls of a river.