Did rainfall and snowmelt fill rivers and lakes on Mars? GETTY
Our February 2021 speaker via Zoom will be Dr. Gaia Stucky de Quay from the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin. The topic of her talk will be evidence for water and its effect on the geomorphology of early Mars. Title: “Assessing the Early Mars Hydroclimate Using Paleolake Geometries". She had a recent paper published in the August 2020 edition of Geology called "Global precipitation and aridity constraints from paleolakes on early Mars". Forbes did an article on that paper in which she is quoted.
Perseverance will land in Jezero crater, home to one of the open lake beds used in the study. Data collected by the rover will help determine how much water was on Mars and whether there are signs of ancient life.
This matters because we know Mars was covered with water. “It had lots of rain or snowmelt to fill those channels and lakes,” said lead author Gaia Stucky de Quay, a postdoctoral fellow at UT's Jackson School of Geosciences. “Now it's completely dry. We’re trying to understand how much water was there and where did it all go.”
The study’s conclusions are pretty loose; researchers using satellite images and topography found that rainfall must have been between a minimum of 13 feet/4 meters and a whopping 520 feet/159 meters in a single episode to fill the lakes.
That’s a large range, but it’s a start.
Here's a link to her page at UT: https://www.jsg.utexas.edu/gaia-stucky/
