Mars is still losing water

bgrpro65 mars 24, 2021

When you look at Mars today it's hard to even imagine it having water. It's dry and dusty, with exposed rock covering the crater-scarred surface. It's an interesting planet for many reasons, but it's kind of like a burnt-out Earth with a thin atmosphere and very little chance of supporting life. In the past, things were probably a lot different, and scientists believe that Mars once had a lot of water. In fact, it's believed that the planet was once completely covered by an ocean, and some of that water still exists today.

Mars has a whole bunch of water frozen as ice near its poles and elsewhere. As the seasons change on the Red Planet, storms whip up the dust and dirt and, as researchers just revealed, water, carrying it to the atmosphere where it is eventually lost. The work was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.