Ancient Mars may have been a beach paradise 4 billion years ago. A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that the Chinese Mars rover Zhurong detected evidence of an underground beach in an area that may have once been an ocean.
Though Zhurong is now inactive, the evidence the rover has collected is vital to understanding the Red Planet’s history. These findings also help support the theory that Mars once had a massive ocean.
"The structures don't look like sand dunes. They don't look like an impact crater. They don't look like lava flows. That's when we started thinking about oceans," Michael Manga, a University of California, Berkeley professor of Earth and planetary science and co-author of the study, said in a press release.
