SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Mars mountain may have arisen from lake sediments A mountain on Mars may have built up over time from lake sediments, according to NASA scientists who have been studying observations from the Curiosity rover scouring the Red Planet. The latest analysis is based on rocks discovered at the lower edges of Mount Sharp, which is located, rather oddly, in the midst of a crater on Earths neighboring planet. While scientists are still not sure how long Mars was wet for any given spell through history, a great surprise was finding slanted rocks and soil that point to the existence of a lake bed in the crater, said Curiosity project scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology. Known as inclined strata, this kind of geological formation is key for understanding how a planet formed but is hard to find distinct examples of, even on Earth, he told reporters. When we saw the inclined strata and they were dipping toward Mount Sharp that was really a great surprise, he said. Where theres now a mountain, there may have once been a series of lakes. Curiositys pictures and data collected from the Martian soil in the lowest sedimentary layers of Mount Sharp, which reaches a height of about three miles (five kilometers), has helped scientists see the remnants of how rivers once carried sand and silt to the lake, depositing sediment at the mouth of the river. This process would have repeated itself again and again to form a delta. After the crater filled to a height of at least a few hundred yards (meters) and the sediments hardened into rock, the accumulated layers of sediment were sculpted over time into a mountainous shape by wind erosion that carved away the material between the crater perimeter and what is now the edge of the mountain, NASA said in a statement.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 15:00:58 +0000
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