“Very early in Mars’ history, maybe 4 billion years ago, the planet was warm enough to support lakes and river networks,” Kite told Ars. “There were seas, and some of those seas were as big as the Caspian Sea, maybe bigger. It was a wet place.” This wet period, though, didn’t last long—it was too short to make the landscape deeply weathered and deeply eroded.
Kite’s team used their model to focus on what happened as the planet got colder, when the era of salts started. “Big areas of snowmelts created huge salt flats, which eventually built up over time, accumulating into a thick sedimentary deposit Curiosity rover is
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