An active hydrologic cycle was there in the early Mars surface environment. It had flowing liquid water that carved river valleys and filled lake basins. To break the confining topography, over 200 of these lake basins filled with sufficient water were there. They caused catastrophic flooding and incision of outlet canyons.
 On this planet, the Martain surface was shaped mainly by massive floods from overflowing crater lakes.  It craved deep chasms and moving vast amounts of sediment. All these were revealed in new research carried led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. On September 29, 2021, in Nature, a study showed that the floods, which probably lasted mere weeks, eroded more sediment.
According to lead author Tim Goudge, an assistant professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences, “If we think about how sediment was being moved across the landscape on ancient Mars, lake breach floods were a critical process globally. And this is a bit of a surprising result because they’ve been thought of as one-off anomalies for so long.”
Billions of years ago, crater lakes were common on the planet when liquid was found on its surface. A small sea’s worth of water was held by some craters. Crater’s edge was breached by it when the water became too much to hold. Catastrophic flooding was caused due to this that carved river valleys in its wake.
The satellites orbiting the planet have taken remote sensing images. With these images, scientists could study the remains of breached Martian crater lakes. The crater lakes and their river valleys have mainly been explored on an individual basis. This is the 1st study to investigate how the Martian surface was shaped by the 262 breached lakes across the planet.
The research reviewed a preexisting catalog of river valleys on the planet. The valley was categorized into valleys that started at a crater’s edge and valleys that formed elsewhere on the landscape. The 1st one indicates they were created during a lake breach flood, and the 2nd one suggests a more gradual formation over time.
The depth, volume, length of the different valley types were compared by the scientists from there. It was found that river valleys formed by crater lake breaches punch far above their weight. A quarter of the planet’s river valley volume was eroded by this.  This discrepancy is accounted for by the fact that outlet canyons are significantly more profound than other valleys.
The median depth of a breach river valley is twice that of other river valleys created more gradually over time at 559 feet. The median depth is about 254 feet. In a geologic instant, the chasms appeared, but they might have had a lasting effect on the surrounding landscape. It was found in the study that the breaches scoured canyons deep. The formation of other nearby river valleys has been influenced by this. The study emphasizes that shaping the Martian surface lake breach river valleys played an essential role. When caters are filled with water, lots of energy gets stored there be released.
