🔴 A Rock From Mars Just Filled a 2-Billion-Year Hole in the Planet’s History
Scientists have dated an unusual Martian meteorite to 1.273 billion years old — placing it almost exactly inside a huge missing chapter in our geological record of Mars.
The meteorite, called NWA 13441, was discovered in Algeria in 2019. Most Martian volcanic meteorites of its type are either younger than about 600 million years or around 2.4 billion years old. Until now, researchers had essentially no samples from the enormous interval between them.
But its age may not even be the strangest part. The rock’s neodymium isotopes suggest that the magma it formed from came from a portion of the Martian mantle that had remained remarkably untouched since the earliest days of the Solar System. Mars formed very quickly and, unlike Earth, has no active plate tectonics constantly remixing its interior — potentially allowing ancient chemical reservoirs to survive for billions of years.
In other words, a small rock blasted off Mars by an impact and eventually found in the Sahara may contain a chemical fingerprint preserved from almost the beginning of the planet itself.
How much of Mars’s earliest history could still be locked inside rocks already lying somewhere on Earth?
#Mars #Space #Meteorite #PlanetaryScience #Geology #Science
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gca.2026.06.035
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1August 11, 2026 10.6K 26
