This would be Mars with oceans and vegetation

Although the surface of Mars is currently arid and inhospitable, science believes that billions of years ago it was covered with as much water as is abundant on our planet today.

Mars is the great goal of the space race. It is going to return to the Moon as part of the Artemis program, but this is clearly focused on the subsequent arrival on Mars, the main challenge of the aerospace industry.

Mars with oceans and vegetation

We will not be able to see the Red Planet (which surely would no longer be called that if it had preserved its water and vegetation) as a garden even if man reaches its surface at some point, but we can get an idea of what it was like in its best moments thanks to different recreations.

How did Mars lose its water?

There are several theories about it, none of which has been 100% proven yet. Most are based on the principle that water vanished from Mars when it lost the magnetic field that protected it from powerful solar winds, when it was both blown away by high-intensity solar winds and locked up as ice below the surface.

Agua en Marte

Current Mars and recreation of 3,500 million years ago. (James Moore and Jon Wade)

Another investigation carried out by scientists from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and published a few years ago, established the hypothesis that the water on Mars was absorbed by the basalt rocks, which, unlike the terrestrial stones, are rich in iron oxide and therefore can retain approximately 25% more water in their interior than the basaltic rocks of the Earth.

“There is a lot of evidence that there was [water]: sedimentary structures, apparent river valleys, hydrated minerals, and possibly an ocean basin (the northern 40% of Mars could be an ancient ocean basin that dried up),” he listed. Jon Wade, lead author of the study.

Región Nili Fossae de Marte

Nili Fossae region of Mars (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)

The study simulated the interaction of water with the mineral composition of the rocks, including factors such as the temperature of the rocks and pressure, and the result was clear: due to its chemical composition, it was inevitable that the water on Mars would be sucked into the mantle. as a consequence of the reaction of its rocks with the surface water.

The oceans and vegetation of Mars

If there was water, many have imagined what it would be like if it had given rise to vegetation. In this sense, we find the work of engineer Kevin Gill, currently a software engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JSL) who works on analysis and visualization projects of data, who managed to recreate what the Red Planet would be like in a hypothesis such as the ” Green and Blue Planet ” more similar to Earth.

He did this using his own program, jDem846 , a geospatial software application designed to produce high-quality two-dimensional and three-dimensional digital elevation model images. He selected (based on NASA studies) which parts of the elevated surface would be land and which would be oceans.

The result was the following:

Recreación océanos Marte (lado oeste)

Recreation oceans Mars (west side)

Recreación océanos Marte (lado este)

Recreation oceans Mars (east side)

For the desert areas, he used textures taken from the Sahara desert and parts of Australia. For the frozen parts, it was based on areas of Russia and for the vegetation it used resources from areas of South America and Africa.