Volcanic super eruptions regularly tore up the surface of Mars billions of years ago, altering the planet's climate for decades and creating scars that are still visible today, a new study has found.

A team of American geologists found evidence that large craters visible in satellite images of northern Mars' Arabia Terra region were not created by asteroids, as some had originally believed, but by massive volcanic eruptions that could blast  billions of tons of gas and molten rock up into the atmosphere. .

But since those powerful eruptions are believed to have taken place some 4 billion years ago, finding conclusive evidence about their nature required rather forensic methods.

"At that point we said, 'OK, well these are minerals that are associated with altered volcanic ash, which has already been documented, so now we're going to look at how the minerals are distributed to see if they follow the pattern we would expect to see from super eruptions," study co-author Alexandra Matiella Novak, a volcanologist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in a statement.

The supervolcanoes, likely active during a period of 500 million years some 4 billion years ago, spewed massive amounts of water vapor, carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere of Mars, throwing the planet's climate off balance for decades. !

Most of the Red Planet's volcanic activity, however, occured in the era of the supervolcanoes some 4 billion years ago.

Mars' 13.6-mile high (21.9 km) Olympus Mons, the biggest volcano in the solar system, is believed to have last erupted about 25 million years ago. .

She later took a career break to pursue further education and added a Master's in Science from the International Space University, France, to her Bachelor's in Journalism and Master's in Cultural Anthropology from Prague's Charles University. She worked as a reporter at the Engineering and Technology magazine, freelanced for a range of publications including Live Science, Space.com, Professional Engineering, Via Satellite and Space News and served as a maternity cover science editor at the European Space Agency

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