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- WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Hard
on the heels of an announcement that scientists may have found evidence
that water still flows to the surface of Mars, geologists said on Friday
they had found evidence that, like Earth, martian oceans were salty.
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- Astronomers agree that Mars must have been warm and wet
billions of years ago, but its oceans have long ago dried up.
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- A team at Arizona State University and Los Alamos National
Laboratory said they had nonetheless been able to get an idea of what those
oceans were like by looking at chunks of rock that were knocked off Mars
and fell to Earth as meteorites.
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- Writing in the July issue of the journal Meteoritics
and Planetary Science, Carleton Moore of ASU and his team said they had
analyzed the inside of the 1.2 billion-year-old Nakhla meteorite, which
fell on Egypt in 1911, and found water-soluble ions that probably would
have been deposited by evaporating brine. "We have concluded
that we have extracted salts that were originally present in Martian water,"
Moore said in a statement. "The salts we found mimic the salts in
Earth's ocean fairly closely."
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- The findings are interesting for a variety of reasons,
not least because scientists believe Mars may have once supported life,
perhaps simple life similar to bacteria.
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- "There was apparently a uniformity between the planets,"
Moore said.
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- "The inference that the early Martian ocean was
very similar to our current ocean also implies that the early Earth's ocean
may have been very similar to what it is today. This is a clue to what
it might have been."
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