History of Water on Mars

“The History of Water on Mars” Essay Water is a very abundant resource in our solar system. You can find water attached to most of the colder and farther planets. When I speak of water though, I mean ice water. Not the silky drink you have every day, but the very high-pressure sealed water that is usually found below the sediment and crust. “But shouldn’t that be where liquid water comes from?” is what most ask, and sometimes the answer is yes, but there are many situations that vary. Just like the planet Earth, Mars’ crust can show us how the planet may have been millions and billions of years ago, which means we can distinctly tell if there was water flow from the higher elevation to the lower and etc. Secondly, we have multiple probes, like NASA’s Viking 2 lander, that can drill into the sedimentary crust and search for ice particles or other forms of water. Lastly, Mars’ atmosphere suggests the possibility for copious amounts of water to be dissipating due to intense conditions. Similar to how Earth has 2 very large basins with lots of continental land in-between, Mars is separated into a very large northern hemisphere basin, and a very large southern hemisphere basin, with higher continental land in a ring around the planet. In these northern plains the surface is so thin, just a few centimeters, which we can easily hint at the large amounts of buried hydrogen near the top soil and a frozen global ice table. Evidence for liquid water is definitely harder to bring together, but we look for the same features water presents itself here on Earth but looking for smaller gully features that seem to run down canyon walls, or very large terrestrial looking water systems. Surprisingly, a few of these branches found seem to all be around the same elevation level, suggesting to an “ocean level” or a very large basin in the past of some sort. Regardless of what we can witness through a telescope or satellite photos, for us to determine real H2O, we have to send a