ArticleNature2017
Primordial clays on Mars formed beneath a steam or supercritical atmosphere.
Article in Nature, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Constraining the history of water and climate on Mars through light element stable isotope analysis of volatiles in returned martian samples.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Supplementing Closed Ecological Life Support Systems with In-Situ Resources on the Moon.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Water heavily fractionated as it ascends on Mars as revealed by ExoMars/NOMAD.Science advances · 2021Article
- The Oldest Highlands of Mars May Be Massive Dust Fallout Deposits.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Olivine-Carbonate Mineralogy of the Jezero Crater Region.Journal of geophysical research. Planets · 2020Article
- Experimental and Simulation Efforts in the Astrobiological Exploration of Exooceans.Space science reviews · 2020Review
- Magma oceans as a critical stage in the tectonic development of rocky planets.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2018Review
- Was There an Early Habitability Window for Earth's Moon?Astrobiology · 2018Article
- A steamy proposal for Martian clays.Nature · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
On Mars, clay minerals are widespread in terrains that date back to the Noachian period (4.1 billion to 3.7 billion years ago). It is thought that the Martian basaltic crust reacted with liquid water during this time to form hydrated clay minerals. Here we propose, however, that a substantial proportion of these clays was formed when Mars' primary crust reacted with a dense steam or supercritical atmosphere of water and carbon dioxide that was outgassed during magma ocean cooling. We present experimental evidence that shows rapid clay formation under conditions that would have been present at the base of such an atmosphere and also deeper in the porous crust. Furthermore, we explore the fate of a primordial clay-rich layer with the help of a parameterized crustal evolution model; we find that the primordial clay is locally disrupted by impacts and buried by impact-ejected material and by erupted volcanic material, but that it survives as a mostly coherent layer at depth, with limited surface exposures. These exposures are similar to those observed in remotely sensed orbital data from Mars. Our results can explain the present distribution of many clays on Mars, and the anomalously low density of the Martian crust in comparison with expectations.
Identifiers
29219967What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.