WASHINGTON \u2013 <\/p>\n
\u2060There is a lot of evidence from orbiting satellites and surface rovers indicating that liquid water was present long ago on the surface of Mars in the form of ponds, lakes and rivers. But the idea that Mars once had a huge and long-lived ocean on its northern plains has remained a matter of debate.<\/p>\n
Scientists have now detected what might be the contours of this putative ocean on Earth’s planetary neighbor, using data collected by a NASA probe that \u200borbited Mars for a decade. Their research indicates the presence of the Martian equivalent of the continental shelf that defines the boundaries of Earth’s \u200coceans.<\/p>\n
They compared \u200cit to a huge “bathtub ring” showing where water may have once met land on Mars. Because Mars does \u200bnot possess continents and lacks the geological process called plate tectonics that led to the formation of Earth’s continents, the researchers are calling the Martian landforms a coastal shelf.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2013 \u2060There is a lot of evidence from orbiting satellites and surface rovers indicating that liquid water…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[61,60,2704,3631,82,247],"class_list":{"0":"post-401231","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-mars","11":"tag-planets","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}