A clash of lava and ice may have unleashed a vast flood on Mars not long ago, a fresh look at surface images suggests.
Mars’s ice caps are scarred by huge chasms, but until recently no one knew for sure what happened to their contents. Now a team led by Niels Hovius of the University of Cambridge reckon they have found volcanic craters in exposed rock at one chasm’s base and scours that suggest huge flows of water.
The craters are between 20,000 and 10 million years old, suggesting liquid water was present on Mars’s surface relatively recently. The wet…
