They show that an unusual dust storm on Mars caused it to lose part of its water

The current image of the Martian planet, which looks desert-like, also shows a surface with channels, minerals altered by water and other geological traces that indicate that it was, in its early days, much more humid and dynamic.

Reconstructing how this water-rich environment disappeared continues to be one of the great challenges of planetary science, although research has revealed new data that would allow us to know how the red planet lost its water.

A study led by the Spanish Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) and the University of Tokyo (Japan) has shown for the first time that an unusual dust storm, intense but local in scale, was able to propel water to the highest layers of the Martian atmosphere during the northern hemisphere summer, a time when this process was not considered relevant.

“The finding reveals the impact of this type of storms on the planet’s climatic evolution and opens a new way to understand how Mars lost much of its water over time,” explained in a statement the IAA-CSIC researcher Adrián Brines, co-principal investigator of the study together with Shohei Aoki, researcher at the University of Tokyo.

One of the keys to knowing how much water Mars has lost is to measure how much hydrogen has escaped into space.since this element is easily released when water decomposes in the atmosphere.

Current measurements show that the planet has lost an enormous amount of water over billions of years, enough to cover much of its surface hundreds of meters deep.

Like Earth, Mars has four seasons due to a similar axial inclination and also has a marked difference in the elevation of the terrain between both hemispheres, lower in the north than in the south, which causes summers in the southern hemisphere to be much warmer and more dynamic than those in the north.

The study has detected an unusual increase in water vapor in the middle atmosphere of Mars during the northern hemisphere summer in Martian year 37 caused by an anomalous dust storm.

The Martian years began to be counted in 1955, when for the first time it was possible to measure the position of Mars in its orbit with sufficient precision and use that moment as a reference. Therefore, that year corresponds to the period 2021-2023 in the Earth calendar.

Different observations have shown that an atypical dust storm caused a sudden and very intense injection of water vapor that reached heights of up to 60-80 kilometers, especially at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere.

“These results add a new piece to the incomplete picture of how Mars has been losing its water over billions of years,” the researchers summarized.