Water, one of the quintessential ingredients for life as we know it, is abundant on Earth today but we are still not sure if the same can be said about other planets in the solar system. There is enough evidence today to suggest that Mars used to have water ion the surface in its early history. But liquid water is missing from the Red Planet’s surface today. New research has come up with a suggestion to understand why Mars isn’t holding water on its surface today.
A study from the Washington University in the US says that the reason is that Mars may be too small in size to hold large amounts of water on the surface.
NASA has provided sufficient evidence to suggest that Mars was once rich in water content with river valleys and channels. However, none of that water can be seen on the Red Planet’s surface today.
Several possible explanations have been put forward. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says that Mars does not fulfil the size requirement to hold water like Earth does.
Senior author of the study and assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, Kun Wang explains, “There is likely a threshold on the size requirements of rocky planets to retain enough water to enable habitability and plate tectonics, with mass exceeding that of Mars.”
The study estimated the “presence, distribution and abundance of volatile elements on different planetary bodies.”
In the study, the researchers found that Mars lost more volatile elements than Earth which is bigger in size, but less than the moon and an asteroid called 4-Vesta, both bodies smaller in size and dry in comparison to it.
Wang further said, “It’s indisputable that there used to be liquid water on the surface of Mars, but how much water in total Mars once had, is hard to quantify through remote sensing and rover studies alone. There are many models out there for the bulk water content of Mars. In some of them, early Mars was even wetter than the Earth. We don’t believe that was the case.”
