Mysteries Of Mars

Mars. A small red planet about half the size of Earth is filled with many wonders and mysteries. What mysteries you ask? Well, you're about to find out. Here on Earth, Mars looks like a giant sphere beautifully painted with various shades of red. However, let's look a little deeper and explore the surface of Mars. The surface of Mars looks like a dry wasteland decorated with old volcanoes and craters. The regloid, or a layer of powdery material covering the bedrock, contains a lot of iron oxide giving Mars its red look. But who cares about that? That's not what you're watching this video for. So let's start exploring the more interesting parts of Mars, starting with its magnificent mountains. Olympus Mons, standing at about 16 miles high or about three times higher than Everest, is the tallest mountain on Mars. But why is Mount Olympus Mons and other Martian mountains so big? On Earth, a volcanic hotspot where rocks are melted in the mantle generating magma remains stationary while the tectonic plates above the hotspot move and drift. When a plate moves over a hotspot, new volcanoes are formed. However, Mars has a lack of moving plate tectonics, so the magma from the hotspot kept erupting in the same area over and over again, gradually building up a larger and larger volcano over time. But aside from containing so many marvelous mountains, Mars also contains some pretty neat canyons, such as Valles Marineris, which is not only the largest canyon Mars has, but perhaps the largest canyon our solar system has. Spanning at about 3,000 kilometers long and as wide as 600 kilometers and diving as deep as 8 kilometers, it's truly one marvelous beast. But how did this marvelous thing even come into existence? Scientists think that 3.5 billion years ago, when the Tarsus region or a volcanic province on Mars was forming, the force from the crust being hauled upwards to form the volcanoes put a huge strain on the crust, causing cracks and fractures in the crust, which grew over time. Now you're probably thinking about water on Mars, which sounds crazy. But as crazy as it sounds, towards the end of September 2015, scientists discovered some dark streaks along steep slopes. Scientists think that the streaks are signs of hydrated minerals such as salts called percolates, which contain water molecules. But there's another mystery that's even bigger than whether there's water on Mars, and that's the mystery of why Mars' atmosphere is so much thinner than Earth's and why Mars looks like a dry, lifeless desert. The thing is, Mars may have not always been the dull, lifeless world it is today. In fact, Mars, more than 1.5 billion years ago, may have been a flourishing world with an abundance of water and an atmosphere much, much denser than it is today. However, all that changed when Mars was hit with some devastating solar winds. A solar wind is a stream of particles composed of protons and electrons, which are catapulted from the sun at speeds of up to 1 million miles per hour. When these solar winds came into contact with Mars, the solar wind's magnetic field produces an electric field, causing gas atoms in Mars' upper atmosphere to catapult into space. Simply put, solar winds are the main reason why Mars doesn't have oceans or a thick atmosphere. But why is Mars so vulnerable to solar winds? And why aren't we affected by them as much? Well, Earth does have a large protective magnetic field created by electrical currents in Earth's core, which deflects harmful solar winds. Mars' magnetic field is far more weaker and far less extensive than Earth's magnetic field. Thus, Mars takes more damage from solar winds than we do. Now, while Mars doesn't have a great magnetic field, it does have many other great mysteries. For example, is there life on Mars? Could we possibly colonize Mars? Or even better, did life on Earth even come from Mars? Yes, some people actually wonder if that's a possibility. Now, we don't have the time in this video to tackle all those mysteries, so if you would like to learn more about Mars and other cool things in science, then be sure to hit that subscribe button and check out some other videos.