A catastrophic outpouring of water–four times the volume of Lake Tahoe–may have gushed from fissures near the equator on Mars as recently as 10 million years ago. Images of the fissures and their surroundings, taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, reveal landforms like those carved by catastrophic flooding on Earth, researchers report.
The set of fissures stretches more than 1,000 kilometers along a lava-rich region north of the equator called the Cerberus plains and appears to be the source of recent, small eruptions of lava.
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