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A meteorite from Mars has interacted with water in the past, likely as a result of volcanic activity that melted ice on the Red Planet over 700 million years ago.
The results help tell the story of an 800-gram (1.8-pound) meteorite This remained a mystery for almost 100 years as it was found in 1931 in a desk drawer at Purdue University in Indiana, USA.
An international team of scientists led by Purdue’s Marissa Tremblay has the answers. By dating the water-altered minerals in the Lafayette meteorite, they determined a date of 742 million years ago. However, according to Mars climate science, it is the Red Planet liquid water mostly disappeared over 3 billion years ago. Where did water come from 742 million years ago?
The meteorite was named Lafayette, after the city where Purdue University is based. How it ended up in this drawer was unknown, but it was known that it originally came from this drawer Mars and had once interacted with liquid water there. The question was: How long ago was the wet experience?
“We do not believe there was abundant liquid water on the surface of Mars at this time,” Tremblay said in one opinion. “Instead, we assume that the water came from the melting of nearby underground ice called permafrost, and that the melting of the permafrost was caused by magmatic activity that still occurs regularly on Mars to this day.”
The Lafayette meteorite is a type of Martian meteorite known as a nakhlite. They consist of igneous, i.e. volcanic, rocks and may come from a crater on the basaltic lava plains near the extinct volcano Elysium Mons. Therefore, recording the history of Nakhlite on Mars is a key goal of planetary scientists.
A black and white photo of a dry landscape riddled with craters and cracks, seen from above
At one point, the Lafayette meteorite (and possibly the other Nakhlites) had been blasted by a meteorite from Mars Effects and thrown into space, it was exposed to this cosmic rays which irradiated the meteorite, forming isotopes dated to 11 million years ago, consistent with the age of the crater near Elysium Mons.
But when did the Lafayette meteorite arrive on Earth and how did it end up in this drawer?
In one earlier paper As of 2022, researchers including Tremblay were conducting detective work to find out. They identified contamination by the mycotoxin deoxynivalenol, more commonly known as vomitoxin, a disease that affects crops.
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“We used organic pollutants from the soil found on Lafayette – particularly plant diseases – that were particularly common in certain years to narrow down when the meteorite impact may have occurred and whether anyone may have witnessed the meteorite impact,” Tremblay said .
Tremblay and her colleagues concluded that Lafayette must have fallen in a field of crops somewhere in semi-rural Indiana around 1919, where it was found by a Purdue University student who may have seen it fall. They took it back to the university, where it ended up in a drawer and was discovered 12 years later. The rest, as they say, is history.
The results were published in the journal on November 6th Geochemical Perspective Letters.
