Mars may be around 140 million miles away from Earth, but the red planet is influencing our deep oceans by helping drive “giant whirlpools,” according to new research.
Scientists analyzed sediments, drilled from hundreds of deep-sea sites over the past half century, to look back tens of millions of years into Earth’s past, in a quest to better understand the strength of deep ocean currents.
The sediments revealed that deep-sea currents weakened and strengthened over 2.4 million-year climate cycles, according to the study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
Adriana Dutkiewicz, the study’s co-author and sedimentologist at the University of Sydney, said the scientists didn’t expect to discover these cycles, and that there is only one way to explain them: “They are linked to cycles in the interactions of Mars and Earth orbiting the Sun,” she said in a statement. The authors say this is first study to make these connections.
The two planets affect each other through a phenomenon called “resonance,” which is when two orbiting bodies apply a gravitational push and pull on each other — sometimes described as a kind of harmonization between distant planets. This interaction changes the shape of their orbits, affecting how close to circular they are and their distance from the sun.
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For the Earth, this interaction with Mars translates to periods of increased solar energy — meaning a warmer climate — and these warmer cycles correlate with more vigorous ocean currents, the report found.
While these 2.4 million-year cycles affect warming and ocean currents on Earth, they are natural climate cycles and not linked to the rapid heating the world is experiencing today as humans continue to burn planet-heating fossil fuels, said Dietmar Müller, professor of geophysics at the University of Sydney and a study co-author.
The authors describe these currents, or eddies, as “giant whirlpools” that can reach the bottom of the deep ocean, eroding the seafloor and causing large accumulations of sediments, like snowdrifts.
The scientists were able to map these strong eddies through “breaks” in the sediment cores they analyzed. Deep-sea sediments build in continuous layers during calm conditions but strong ocean currents disrupt this, leaving a visible stamp of their existence.
Because satellite data that can visibly map changes in ocean circulation has only been available for a few decades, sediment cores — which help to build a picture of the past going back millions of years — are very useful for understanding the Earth’s deep ocean currents and the forces that drive them.
