/sci/ - Science & Math

>The science team behind the Mars Curiosity rover has announced that some of the images it has taken reveal signs of a significant water flow at some point in the planet's past. Although there have been numerous indications of water in Mars' past, the discovery provides a unique opportunity to understand the precise environment in which the watery deposits formed.
>The deposits look strikingly similar to some found on Earth, in which rounded rocks, carried by currents, settle into a stream bed and are locked into a conglomerate. The rounded shapes show that the rocks were worn by transport over long distances, while the size of the rocks is too large for them to have been brought there by wind. The flows seem to have been sizable, too. "From the size of gravels it carried, we can interpret the water was moving about 3 feet per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep," said Berkeley's William Dietrich in the JPL's release.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/09/curiosity-finds-ancient-stream-bed-on-mars/