Astronomers say that billions of years ago, Mars had beaches suitable for vacation.

To put aside, Santa Monica. It seems like Mars once had beaches, which would bring money to the California coast.

An international team of researchers revealed evidence of a “vacation-style” beach on Mars: an underground rock layer that proves to testify against an ancient northern ocean and gently slap the waves, as detailed in a study published on January 14. PNAS. Their work prompts previous research shows that Mars has held a large amount of water and potentially livable environments.

“We found places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and the Ancient River Delta,” Penn State geologist Benjamin Cardenas said in a university statement. “We found evidence of wind, waves, no shortage of sand – a suitable resort-style beach.”

Cardenas and his colleagues studied geological data collected by China's Zhurong Rover in 2021, in a region of Mars called the Utopia Project. Zhurong is equipped with ground-penetrating radar, which “allows us to understand the earth’s underground, which allows us to perform geology that we have never done before,” said Michael Manga, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who also participated in the research.

Radar data reveals a striking similarity between the underground rock layer and the geological structures on Earth, called “foreshore sediments” – an inclined formation formed by the currents that pull sediments into the ocean. The researchers confirmed the similarity by comparing Mars data with radar images of coastal sediments above the ground, even the angle of the underground Mars slope to the slope on our Earth.

“This immediately stood out for us because it showed that there was a wave, which meant a dynamic interface between air and water,” Cardenas explained. “When we looked back at the earliest life developments on Earth, it was in the interaction between the ocean and land, so this was painting a picture of the ancient habitable environment capable of carrying conditions that were friendly to microbial life.”

After ensuring that other factors such as rivers, winds or volcanic activity cannot be explained, the researchers believe that the Martian strata, as well as the thickness of the sediment, meant that it existed on the ocean coast of the past.

“We see the coastline of this body of water evolve over time,” Cardenas added. “We tend to think of Mars as a static snapshot of the Earth, but it is developing. Rivers are flowing, sediments are moving, and land is building and eroding. This sedimentary geology can tell us what the landscape looks like, how they develop, and importantly, it can help us determine what life we ​​are looking for in the past.”

The study supports previous research claiming that Mars once had a huge ocean, while also suggesting that one of the highly reviewed warm and humid periods on the Red Planet may have lasted for tens of millions of years.

If Mars does have a seaside property, its ancient coast may be the best place to find signs of past lives. Future missions can help solve this problem: Have microbes ever called these beaches home, or just rolled in an empty world?