Supervolcanoes on Mars influenced planet’s early atmosphere: scientists

The Red Planet could have seen massive eruption from ''supervolcanoes'' capable of spewing 1,000 cubic kilometres of material in one massive eruption – about 200 times the size of the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1991.

According to scientists, the supervolcanoes on Mars, which were now extinct, might have played a critical role in the formation of the planet's early atmosphere many millions of years ago when the planet could have supported microbial life-forms.

According to Dr Joseph Michalksi of the Natural History Museum in London and the Planetary Institute in Tucson, Arizona, features typical of supervolcanoes, that erupted suddenly, with immense energy, not leaving behind cone-shaped mountains, like the more slowly erupting volcanoes on earth, had been discovered in an area of Mars not previously thought to be volcanic.

He added, the atmosphere of any planet including our own came largely from volcanic outgassing, and if one wanted to know about the early phase of that we needed to know about these early volcanoes and this discovery gave an early window into that process.

An example of a Martian supervolcano was the Eden Patera, an irregularly-shaped crater in an area of Mars called the Arabia Terra Dr Michalski said.

Michalski who led the study published in the journal Nature said the discovery of such supervolcanic structures ''fundamentally changed'' how ancient volcanism on Mars was viewed.

Michalski and Dr Jacob Bleacher, a volcano specialist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre, say vast areas of collapsed ground in Arabia Terra are the likely remains, of supervolcanoes.

According to the scientists, supervolcanoes would have had a profound impact on the early evolution of Mars, with their gases influencing the composition of the atmosphere and impacting the climate.

Further, the ashfall would have covered the landscape across great swathes of the planet, and it was quite likely some of the deposits the rovers were now encountering on Mars had their origin in colossal blasts.

Michalski said, scientists knew the planet must have been more active in its deep past, in its first billion years, but they had always struggled to find evidence for these early volcanoes. He added, the supervolcanoes, they reported in Nature might solve the puzzle.

Unlike, familiar volcanoes - such as Etna or St Helens on Earth, or indeed Olympus Mons on Mars - supervolcanoes did not build mountains out of layers of lava, rather their massive scale meant, when they erupted, the whole landscape let go with multiple vents and fissures.

After the eruption, the ground would fall back into the void left by all the ejected material, producing a large bowl or caldera.