Becky Ferreira, 1 December 2022.

Excerpt:

>A long time ago, a huge asteroid struck a watery planet in our solar system, sparking an enormous megatsunami that reached hundreds of feet into the air and left permanent traces on the landscape.

>You might be picturing the famous space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth, but scientists have now confirmed that the same story played out on Mars some 3.4 billion years ago, at a time when Mars hosted a huge ocean that might have hosted microbial life.

>After decades of speculation about this ancient extraterrestrial impact and megatsunami, researchers led by Alexis Rodriguez, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, have pinpointed the likely spot, called Pohl crater, where the asteroid collided with the Martian ocean at roughly 24,000 miles per hour.

>This key discovery suggests that Pohl crater, and its surrounding regions, could be important targets in the search for alien life, as they may bear “information on how the ocean’s habitability and possible life evolved,” according to a study published in Scientific Reports on Thursday.

>The team was also able to reconstruct some of the mind-boggling effects of this ancient impact and the subsequent megatsunami, which may have produced 800-foot-high waves.

> 

Alexis Rodriguez, in a call with Vice:

>“I think that we have two distinct and very interesting astrobiological targets that come out of this study,” Rodriguez said. “The first one is obviously the Viking 1 landing site because we have this controversy so it would be good to be able to resolve it.” The second, he added, are the remains of mud volcanoes in this huge dried-up ocean basin.

>“There is a possibility that this mud volcanism was driven by the release of seawater trapped in the sediments, or gasses connected to the evaporation of seawater, and obviously, that has very interesting astrobiological implications,” he concluded. “So, there are lots of targets to understand the evolution of the ocean of Mars, its potential biochemistry, and the way that the environment changed within the ocean over time.”

Scientific Reports, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-18082-2