Billions of Years Ago, Mars Featured Beaches Fit for a Vacation, Astronomers Say

Step aside, Santa Monica. It seems that Mars once had beaches that would give the Californian coast a run for its money. An international team of researchers has revealed evidence of bygone “vacation-style” sandy beaches on Mars: underground rock layers that testify to an ancient northern ocean with gently lapping waves, as detailed in a study published January 14 in the journal PNAS. Their work bolsters previous research suggesting that Mars once hosted large bodies of water and a potentially habitable environment. “We’re finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas,” Benjamin Cardenas, a geologist at Pennsylvania State University and a co-author of the study, said in a university statement. “We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand—a proper, vacation-style beach.” Cardenas and his colleagues studied geological data collected by the Chinese Zhurong rover in 2021 in an area of Mars called Utopia Planitia. Zhurong comes equipped ... Read full article.