A giant wall of red water rises suddenly tothe height of a modernskyscraper and roars across Mars close to the speed of sound. According to researchers from the NASA Ames Research Center in California and the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, this is what happened onMars around 3.4 billion years ago when two mega-tsunamis ravaged the red planet.
Themonster waves were powerful enough to drag along boulders that were up to 30 feet tall. When the watermassesretreated to the sea,they had carved canals32 mileslong and up to600 feet wide into the landscape.
Satellite images revealthe tsunamis
New satellite images of the Northern Plains of Marsput scientists on the trail of the violent events that probably took placea bitmore than a billion years after the solar system formed.At the time, the red planet was likely both wet and much warmer than it is today.
Tsunamiswere more than 350 feet tall
The waves most likely were createdwhen two asteroids or comets,a few million years apart, drove down into the cold ocean in the northern hemisphere and eachcreated a crater estimated to be almost 20 milesin diameter.
This triggered giant tidal waves which, according to the researchers ‘ calculations were initially at least150 feetandin some places up to360 feet high.While the first tsunami inundated an area of around 300.000square miles– an area larger than the size ofTexas– the second one flooded an area of around 386.000square miles,the equivalent ofthe surface area of Texas and Arizona combined.
The study was based on digital topography images combined with thermal and visible images from the Mars Global Surveyor, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey.
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