Some massive loads of rocks are formed on mars about a mile high over billions of years says the researchers. These massive mounds are formed because of the strong winds. These winds craved the mounds on the mars. This location can pin down the water when the global climatic changes takes place on the Red Planet.
“The findings show the importance of wind in shaping the Martian landscape, a force that, on Earth, is overpowered by other processes,” said lead author Mackenzie Day from the University of Texas at Austin.
“On Mars, there are no plate-tectonics and no liquid water so you don’t have anything to overprint that signature and over billions of years you get these mounds, which speaks to how much geomorphic change you can really instigate with just wind,” Mr Day informed.
“There’s been a theory out there that these mounds formed from billions of years of wind erosion, but no one had ever tested that before. So the cool thing about our paper is we figured out the dynamics of how wind could actually do that,” stated Mr Day.
All about this research is published in the Journal Geophysical Research Letters, a journal American Geophysical Union which is published on March 31st.
These researches are conducted by Day along with Jackson School researchers Gary Kocurek and David Mohrig from the Department of Geological Sciences and University of Texas which is located at Dallas researcher William Anderson.
Researchers created a miniature about 30 centimeters wide and 4 centimeters deep to test whether wind could create a mound. They filled the miniature with damp sand and placed it in a wind tunnel. They waited till all the crater is blown away they finally found some elevations and the distribution of sand in it. Finally after all the research is done they found that a mound is left at the sediment they arranged which is also eroded away later.
Researchers say to understand wind dynamics they also built a computer model that showed them how the wind flowed through the crater at different stages of erosion. Mr Day also said, “We went from a filled crater layer cake to this mounded shape that we see today.”