New discovery reveals secrets of Mars
Mars has always been one of the most interesting things people wondered about. New discovery revealed more.
According to scientists, Mars may have been hit by its own "dinosaur killer" asteroid that caused a mega tsunami. An asteroid impact similar to the Chicxulub impact that wiped out most of Earth's dinosaurs 66 million years ago struck the planet from a shallow ocean region, causing water to spread throughout the planet.
New discovery reveals secrets of Mars
Past research has suggested that an asteroid or comet impaction on an ocean on the northern plains of Mars may have caused a mega tsunami about 3.4 billion years ago. But before the new study, the location of the impact crater was unclear. Alexis Rodriguez of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, USA, and his colleagues analyzed the surface maps of the Red Planet, created by combining images from previous missions to the planet.
They detected an impact crater that could cause a mega tsunami, a giant wave. The diameter of the crater, which they named Pohl, is 110 kilometers.It is located in the northern plains, in an area about 120 meters below proposed sea level, in an area where previous studies suggest it may be covered by an ocean. The crater may have formed about 3.4 billion years ago, according to researchers based on Pohl's location and looking at its location above and below rocks that date to this time.
The study's authors ran simulations of asteroid and comet impacts on this region to test what kind of impact might have caused Pohl and whether it would cause a mega tsunami. Simulations creating craters of similar sizes to Pohl resulted from a 9-kilometer asteroid encountering strong ground resistance (13 million megatons of TNT energy released) or a 3-kilometer asteroid encountering weak ground resistance (0.5 million megatons of TNT energy released).
