In Search of

Martian
Planetary scientists look at Mars and ask,Where has all the water gone?
ike so many of his generation, Timothy J. Parker has imagined what might have once been. Ive always wanted

L
a passion for planets. He started out interpreting land-
forms in aerial photographs, but his scientific attention
wandered in the mid-1970s when NASAs Viking or-
biters showed that Mars once teemed with geologic vi-
tality. Drawn to those exquisite views of towering
volcanoes and long-abandoned waterways, Parker
Mars to be nice and warm and comfortable, he muses, a
place where we could someday find trilobites.
Perusing the Viking images, he noticed some subtle arcs,
stripes, and ripples in the ancient Martian landscape. To his
trained eye, they bore striking resemblances to the desiccated
margins of Lake Bonneville, a prehistoric sea that once cov-

BY J . K E L LY B E AT T Y

Here is one scheme for how a large ocean might have formed on
Mars, as rendered for Sky & Telescope by astronomical artist Don
Davis. Left: By the time the period of primordial bombardment had
ceased in the inner solar system, roughly 3.8 billion years ago,
much of the planets uppermost surface had likely already cooled
below the freezing point of water. Water percolating through the
crust gravitated freely toward the low-lying northern hemisphere,
where it collected into a large sea or ocean. Middle: The frozen crust
grew thicker, and polar caps formed. The great mass of ice at the
north pole pressurized the remaining water below it, forcing it back
toward the southern highlands. In some locations the frozen crust
proved too weak to confine the underground flow, causing titanic
floods to burst forth some 2 to 3 billion years ago. Right: Today the
Martian crust is probably frozen too thoroughly to permit any re-
maining water to escape its deep, subterranean confinement.

38 November 1999 Sky & Telescope 1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

NASA / PLANETARY DATA SYSTEM
20 km
Seas
ered parts of Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. Most of the shorelike
vestiges lay in Marss northern hemisphere, whose flat and rel-
atively featureless plains stand in inexplicable contrast to the
more ancient and heavily cratered highlands in the south.
Over time, Parker and several colleagues came to believe that
the putative shorelines required at least two, and perhaps
several, highstands of a sea or ocean with temperatures above
freezing for at least geologically brief periods of time.
In these same lowlands other researchers had already iden-
1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
Giant mudcracks in the Martian northern hemisphere? Planetary
geologists have long suspected that these polygonal patterns on
Mars mark where water- or ice-saturated ground dried out and
fractured. New analyses suggest instead that the cracks may have
formed when the ground bowed upward after a massive overlying
sheet of ice disappeared.
tified huge stacks of layered sediments and giant intercon-
nected patterns of cracks more circumstantial evidence for
standing bodies of water. Moreover, several gargantuan flood
channels had disgorged directly into the northern plains.
Maybe those trilobites werent so far-fetched after all. But
could water have once inundated nearly a third of the planet?
It was a very radical idea at the time, says James W. Head III
(Brown University). This represented a big change in think-
ing, the kind that makes you automatically very skeptical.
Getting to the Next Level
As tantalizing as the Viking data seemed, even Parker freely
admits they fell far short of proof. However, a different kind
of flood the infusion of new data from Mars Global Sur-
veyor has reopened the debate over the red planets fluvial
fate. Eventually geologists hope to get some answers from
MGSs high-resolution images, which can record surface details
as small as 1.4 meters across (April issue, page 42).
In the meantime the ocean hypothesis has gotten a big boost
from the millions of altitude measurements obtained planet-
wide by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter. Using MOLA data,
Head and several colleagues have identified intriguing clues at
and near the putative shorelines. First, a confined body of water
should have the same elevation everywhere, so they checked the
altitudes of the two most prominent sets of features mapped by
Parker. The outer, higher boundary, termed the Arabia shore-
line, was found to weave up and down in elevation over a
range of 512 km not an encouraging sign. But the inner,
Deuteronilus shoreline comes much closer to having a con-
DON DAVIS / SOURCE MAPS: ASTROGEOLOGY TEAM (USGS / FLAGSTAFF)
MICHAEL H. CARR (USGS)
2 km
TIMOTHY J. PARKER (JPL)
5 km
stant elevation, never deviating by more than 280 meters from
its mean over the boundarys entire circumference. In one spot
the fit is disturbed by the crater Lyot. Another slight mismatch
occurs in the Elysium region, where the true boundary may lie
buried under lava flows, and a third could have resulted from
the regional crustal heaving that created the Tharsis bulge.
Second, the Martian surface appears smoother and its fea-
tures more subdued below the Deuteronilus boundary than
above it. Writing in Geophysical Research Letters last December
15th, Head and his team report that the northern plains com-
prise some of the smoothest terrain yet encountered on Mars.
They also note that wide, gentle terraces often occur at or below
the supposed contact. On Earth such terraces sometimes form
when a shoreline recedes, though Head says they might mark
where ice-saturated ground has slumped down a shallow slope.
A third intriguing revelation concerns Chryse Planitia, the
large plain where the Viking 1 and Mars Pathfinder landers
set down. Mikhail A. Ivanov (Vernadsky Institute, Russia) and
Head find that six major flood channels empty into Chryse at
elevations within 350 meters of one another and within
40 November 1999 Sky & Telescope 1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
NASA / PLANETARY IMAGE ATLAS
1 km
Upper left: The sinuous trace running diagonally across this image
may be a billion-year-old shoreline on Mars. Taken by the Viking
2 orbiter in late 1977, the scene is 14 kilometers across. Upper
right: Although Mars Global Surveyor can record the Martian sur-
face in much finer detail than the Viking orbiters did, convincing
evidence for ancient shorelines has been sparse to date. In this
MGS image, the interior of a degraded, 5-km-wide crater bears
curving terraces (arrowed) that correspond to the higher, older
Arabia shoreline proposed by Timothy J. Parker. Left: Concentric
terraces surround isolated mountains in this Viking 1 view.
180 meters of the Deuteronilus contact over a span of
2,200 km. By implication, the great northern sea had already
risen to that level, or nearly so, when the last torrents of
floodwater came barreling down the channels.
If Parkers ocean notion is correct, at least 27 million square
kilometers of Martian real estate were covered. The water stood
620 meters deep on average, with a maximum depth of 1.5 km,
and totaled 15 million cubic kilometers a third of the At-
lantic Oceans volume. Based on different estimates of the plan-
ets volatile inventory, Mars could easily have that much water.
The trick, however, is getting it all onto the surface at once. For
example, although the flood channels on Mars dwarf any com-
parable feature on Earth, they would have needed to gush forth
dozens of times to fill the northern plains to the Deuteronilus
boundary. In 1991 a group led by Victor R. Baker (University of
Arizona) proposed that such inundations have occurred repeat-
edly, whenever volcanic stirrings deep in the crust trigger
wholesale thawing of the Martian permafrost.
An ocean was an inevitable consequence of the conditions
present on early Mars, offers Stephen M. Clifford (Lunar and
Planetary Institute). Regardless of whether the shoreline evi-
dence is real or illusory, he points out that the primordial plan-
et had an unfrozen, permeable crust that naturally allowed
water to drain into the northern lowlands. Michael H. Carr
(U.S. Geological Survey), who like Clifford specializes in waters
role in Martian history, agrees: The low-lying areas simply had
to have standing bodies of water in Noachian time, roughly 312
 to 4 billion years ago. But hes skeptical about whether they
could have existed much more recently than that.
In Cliffords view, the formation of an ocean early in Mar-
tian history led to the catastrophic floods 2 to 3 billion years
ago, not the other way around. By then, its internal heat dwin-
dling, the planet was already in a deep freeze. The northern
ocean and the crust elsewhere had begun to freeze from the
top down. Thick ice caps topped each pole, and pressure from
the northern cap was forcing deep-lying water southward and
uphill into the highlands. But the frozen crust wasnt yet thick
enough to withstand the growing hydraulic pressure, creating
repeated breakouts at weak points. The crust should have
been leaking like a sieve throughout this period, Clifford
notes. The floodwaters rushed northward, onto and under the
great oceanic ice slab. The increase in ocean volume would
float the ice cover and create an annulus of open water, per-
haps with ice flows, Parker speculates. These would then be
whipped around by the wind to erode shorelines.
Doubts and Concerns
Some Martian specialists are warming to the idea of the ocean
hypothesis, but others still have reservations. For example,
Parker sees evidence for high-water marks that culminate
more than 3 km above the Deuteronilus features. If real, these
Two putative shorelines in Marss northern hemisphere are
shown on an elevation map created from MGS altimetry data.
The topographic match to a constant sea level is best for the
Deuteronilus boundary (yellow line), which encompasses an
area slightly larger than the Mediterranean Sea. The circular
lowland is Utopia Planitia, the filled-in site of a primeval im-
pact basin 2,000 km in
180
diameter.
0 21
15
Olympus
Elysium
Mons
Mons
ARCADIA
0
higher boundaries imply that the planet wrung virtually its
entire allotment of water from its interior and onto the sur-
face. Moreover, notes Bruce M. Jakosky (University of Col-
orado), theres little evidence that primordial Mars had the
kind of subterranean transport system that Clifford proposes.
Carr has argued that each successive channel-borne flood
dumped its water onto the northern plain and quickly froze
in place. Successive floods did not recharge the ocean but
simply made the ice thicker. The flat plains we see today ba-
sically represent the tops of these ice layers, Carr explains, so
if these shorelines are real, my hypothesis gets thrown out.
Besides, he continues, Parkers boundaries are all consider-
ably higher than the current plains surface, meaning that much
of the oceans contents has somehow disappeared. Where did
all that water go? At best, todays northern and southern polar
caps hold only a third of the standing water represented by the
Deuteronilus shoreline. More critically, Carr asks, how do you
get rid of it? Sublimation of water vapor into the atmosphere
would be excruciatingly slow up near the pole, especially once
the plains were covered with windblown dust. One solution is
that Mars has undergone very wide swings in obliquity (polar
tilt), which could have accelerated waters departure from its
northern confinement. The situation at high latitudes poses the
biggest conceptual problems for this model, Clifford admits,
but I think high obliquities are at least part of the answer.
Meanwhile, Parker is having trouble identifying distinct
shorelines in Mars Global Surveyors ultrasharp views some
of which were targeted precisely where the boundaries should
lie. Hes not surprised that they are proving elusive, in part be-
cause of the early-afternoon illumination in all the images.
Why arent they more obvious? Because theyre short-lived and
fragile, Parker explains. For example, the features rimming Lake
Bonneville have almost completely disappeared, even though
they formed less than 100,000 years ago; in contrast, their puta-
tive Martian counterparts are billions of years old. Nonetheless,
Michael C. Malin (Malin Space Science Systems), who built
0 the MGS camera, finds the pictorial evidence weak so far.
What one does or doesnt see in these pictures is in the
eye of the beholder, Malin observes. Parker may
have the right answer, but for the wrong reason.
Getting to the bottom of what shaped the ex-

24

pansive plains of northern Mars may not be

12

Tharsis PLANITIA
easy. Besides the equivocal images, MGS data
show little spectral evidence for widespread
deposits of carbonates or salts. These are the
Alba UTOPIA kinds of compounds that should have
Patera
PLANITIA formed when water leisurely lapped against
the Martian shore and mingled with the
270

North polar
90

ice cap planets carbon-dioxide atmosphere. A res-

olution of the debate will probably hinge
on the ground-penetrating radars and seis-
mic stations that will be sent to the red
0
Ka

AC I DA L I A
+6 planet in the coming years.
se
iV

PLANITIA Meanwhile, Parker has already resigned

a

himself to the possibility that the Mars of

lle
s

0 his imagination was never warm and wet.

60

30

Chryse +3

But, he insists, I do think the shoreline hy-

Planitia pothesis still holds water. Clearly, the battle isnt
Arabia
over yet. And Clifford adds, Whether early Mars
Deuteronilus ARABIA was warm or cold, its long-lived ocean had an effect
30
0 on the subsequent evolution of the planets surface.
Elevation (km) TERRA 33
8 4 0 +4 +8
0 1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Sky & Telescope November 1999 41
SOURCE: MOLA SCIENCE TEAM (NASA / GSFC), T. J. PARKER