Discovered in 2005, the
clays in the southern hemisphere of Mars are often considered as a proof of the
survival of liquid water on the Red Planet at a very early period of between
4.5 and 4 billion years. But the work of a Franco-American team led by researchers
at the Institute of Chemistry of materials and environments Poitiers (CNRS / University
de Poitiers) [1] questioned this interpretation. In an article to be published
on September 9 on the website of the journal Nature Geosciences, they show that
these clays are likely to be of magmatic origin. The many similarities between
the Martian clays and those of volcanic origin collected on the Murrow atoll
support their hypothesis.
