According to RCO News Agency, quoted by Space, the amount of water evaporated from Mars in space is enough to form an ocean with a depth of several hundred kilometers.
Mars was hot and humid during the last 3 billion years and had large water bodies and a heavy atmosphere, but today the red planet is uninhabitable, cold and dry, and it is not clear what happened to its water. John Clark from Boston University says about this: Water may have migrated to only 2 places. It is possible that this material is frozen on the surface or its molecules are converted into atoms and in the next step the atoms are scattered in space from the atmosphere of the planet.
Of course, most of the water on Mars is already on the planet. It seems that there are huge deposits of it at a depth of 11.5 to 20 km below the surface of the planet. On the red planet, there is 1 to 2 kilometers of water as much as a global layer.
A small amount of water ice is also trapped in the shallow frozen layer and in the polar peaks of Mars. During the Martian summer, this ice may sublimate and inject water vapor into the atmosphere. Most of this water vapor circulates from one pole to another and freezes in the hemisphere where it is winter, but a part of this water vapor reaches the upper atmosphere of the planet, where the solar ultraviolet light separates the water molecules and It decomposes into its constituent atoms. The oxygen in the water ends up in oxidizing materials on the surface, which is why Mars appears red, or it may combine with carbon to form carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, hydrogen atoms (or their heavier isotopic counterpart, deuterium) may escape into space and be carried along with the solar wind.
Since deuterium is heavier than hydrogen, it does not escape easily from the Martian atmosphere. This means that the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in the Martian atmosphere is very important, and the abundance of this substance relative to hydrogen increases over time because hydrogen is lost faster.
On the other hand, Mars and Earth are thought to have obtained water from the same source. The ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in water on Mars 3-4 billion years ago was probably the same as that of Earth. This ratio is 8 to 10 times more than the Earth. There are certain uncertainties in the measurements, but by comparing the water ratio of Mars with its current state and considering the rate of loss of hydrogen and deuterium in space, it is possible to calculate the amount of water lost by Mars in history.
According to previous observations of the MAVEN mission, Mars has lost water equivalent to a global layer between tens and hundreds of meters deep. This, along with the large amount of water recently buried on Mars, suggests that the Red Planet was rich in water in its distant past.
However, MAVEN, with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, has now found unforeseen complications in the story of Mars’ water loss. Together, these instruments have shown that the rate of hydrogen loss is seasonal, with most of the water escaping at the perigee, which is the closest point in Mars’ orbit around the Sun. This is associated with an increase in water vapor in the middle part of the planet’s atmosphere, which occurs as a result of increased seasonal heat. During the perigee, the southern hemisphere of Mars turns towards the sun, and the red planet is placed in the sand storm season. Airborne dust particles also contribute to atmospheric heat and water vapor content.
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