A flood of new research on Martian geological history... (That was a water-on-Mars joke.)

I found it sort of interesting that two of the new research papers whose publication I happened to catch over the last few days were studies on Martian geology and reminders that the Red Planet once had conditions that may well have enabled Barsoomian warfare.  That's probably overstating it a little bit, but I do marvel sometimes at how, when I was a kid, I was under the impression that the idea of life on Mars was an outdated and overly fanciful notion, and the longer I've lived, the more we've seen real evidence that liquid water (indicating conditions suitable for life) existed on the surface of Mars in the past and...who knows...maybe it's still there somewhere (probably a stretch, but see the thesis of this sentence).

The first paper came out on Monday in the highly regarded PNAS and covered radar imaging from China's Zhurong Rover, which indicated a history of plenty of surface water and lots of space for living things to grow.  You can read about it at Penn State's website here; here's the quote of the article, from the university's Benjamin Cardenas: "We’re finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas.  We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand -- a proper, vacation-style beach."

Then on Tuesday, Nature Communications published a paper that gives a nontraditional view of why the planet is red, and which indicates that its current chemical structure reinforces a history of "ancient cold and wet conditions on Mars."  You can read more about that at the Discover Magazine website here; the image below is yoinked from that article.

Again, not my image; it came from here

These papers remind me how much fun is still left in speculating on the life history of one of our closest cosmic neighbors.  Mars has played into so many works that influenced my views of science fiction and of the world in general; it's easy to dismiss "Mars stories" as old-fashioned, but sometimes old-fashioned stories still have a lot of life left in them...

In continuing with that little reminder, don't forget this table from OD&D book 3, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures: