In the foothills of a Martian mountain, NASA's Curiosity rover found stunning new evidence of an ancient lake in the form of rocks etched with the ripples of waves — and the telltale signs appeared in an unlikely place.
The rover is traversing an area of Mars called the "sulfate-bearing unit" that researchers previously thought would only show evidence of mere trickles of water, as scientists believed the rocks there formed as the surface of the red planet was drying out. Instead, the rover found some of the clearest evidence yet of ancient waters.
The sulfate-bearing unit is a region previously identified by the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter as containing salty mineral deposits just beneath an 18,000-foot mountain called Mount Sharp. Scientists consider the sulfate-bearing unit to be a location rife with clues about how and why Mars morphed from a watery planet into the frozen place it is today, and researchers have long sought to explore the area in more depth.
"Billions of years ago, waves on the surface of a shallow lake stirred up sediment at the lake bottom, over time creating rippled textures left in rock," according to a NASA news release. Specifically, the rocks were discovered in what's called the Marker Band Valley, a zigzag formation of rocks that stands out against the landscape, thanks to its darker coloring. The rover began exploring the Marker Band feature — which was found to have thin, hard rocks covering the surface is a scalelike pattern — in 2022.
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