How long did Mars’ water flow?
Last week, an interdisciplinary team calculated the flow rate of rivers on Mars and Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The researchers tweaked equations initially developed to calculate the flow of rivers on Earth.
The team found that rivers in Gale Crater (Curiosity’s domain) probably flowed for at least 100,000 years; in Perseverance’s Jezero Crater they probably flowed for at least 1 million years.
“The Martian rivers we studied were not just fleeting; they appear to have flowed over prolonged time periods during which conditions favorable to life may have been maintained,” Taylor Perron, a planetary scientist at MIT and the study’s co-author, told Gizmodo in an email. “The flow rates in the rivers we studied on Titan may be as large as in big rivers on Earth, even though Titan is smaller than Earth.”
