Planetary scientists have discovered remnants of giant supervolcanoes in a region in the northern highlands of Mars known as Arabia Terra. The discovery could alter the way we think about climate evolution on the Red Planet.
This false color image shows the Eden Patera supervolcano, Arabia Terra, Mars. Image credit: ESA / Mars Express / Freie Universitat Berlin / NHM.
“Although we already know about the volcanoes on Mars spanning 3.5 billion years, the mystery of Martian science has been what happened in the first billion years,” said Dr Joseph Michalski of Natural History Museum, London, first author of the study published in the journal Nature.
Typical Mars volcanoes are mountain-shaped shields created from layers of lava and most closely resemble mountains in Hawaii.
The newly discovered supervolcanoes (the term given to a massive volcano that produces more than 1,000 cubic km of material during one eruption) are much older and, rather than forming mountains, have collapsed inwardly.
These supervolcanoes, which look like irregularly shaped craters, were found in Arabia Terra in the northern highlands of Mars.
According to Dr Michalski and second co-author Dr Jacob Bleacher of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the discovery could affect our understanding of the atmosphere on Mars since all atmospheres, including Earth’s, are made up of gases originally emitted from volcanoes that eventually bind with other compounds and settle.
This image shows the morphology of Eden Patera. Image credit: Joseph Michalski / Jacob Bleacher.
The atmosphere on the Red Planet consists predominantly of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and argon, which originated through volcanic emissions.
“Because gases released by these supervolcanoes would have disturbed the early Martian climate, the more we discover about them, the better we will understand the timing of the planet’s evolution and how habitable the surface might have been.”
“Volcanism is the thread binding nearly every aspect of Mars’ geological evolution. The better we understand it, the better we understand the planet,” Dr Michalski concluded.
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Bibliographic information: Joseph R. Michalski & Jacob E. Bleacher. 2013. Supervolcanoes within an ancient volcanic province in Arabia Terra, Mars. Nature 502, 47–52; doi: 10.1038/nature12482
