Tsunamis on Mars? Splashy Claim Raises Eyebrows.
Observations hint at catastrophic waves in the planet’s past, but not all experts are convinced that the necessary oceans existed.
On our planet, earthquake-triggered tsunamis can be catastrophic. But on Mars, meteor strikes may have generated tsunamis 10 times larger than anything seen here—behemoth waves of destruction capable of submerging the Statue of Liberty and the Capitol Building.
The mega-tsunamis would have occurred about 3.4 billion years ago, when two large space rocks slammed into a chilly sea in the Martian north. The first of these impacts, according to a study published this week in Scientific Reports, spawned massive, nearly 400-foot-tall (120-meter-tall) waves that carried bus-size boulders many miles inland. The waves flooded more than 220,000 square miles (570,000 square kilometers), an area larger than many U.S. states.
The next impact, which would have occurred some several million years later, met
