NASA take note: Martian landscapes in ancient Warwickshire
Over the Bank Holiday, NASA’s latest robotic Mars lander, named Phoenix, made the national and international headlines.
Not for the first time since the millennium, television viewers and internet surfers have been inspired and thrilled by images of an arid, rocky world, 35 million miles from our home planet at its very closest.
Today, Warwickshire is a green, mild and relatively comfortable place to live. However, this has not always been the case. The rock strata that make up parts of our county reveal beds of reddened sandstone, clay and pebbly layers that formed in arid, desert like environments. These show us that between about 300 and 200 million years ago, the Warwickshire landscape, at times, had much in common with the surface of Mars. The evidence is all around us. Kenilworth Castle, for instance, is made up of locally quarried red sandstones that originated in an arid, desert-like landscape.
By studying ancient rocks, Earth-bound geologists can learn a lot about alien worlds as well as our own.
Jon Radley, Keeper of Geology for Warwickshire County Council, said
“The latest photos from Mars show further remarkable evidence for a barren, arid landscape, reminiscent of central England’s ancient desert past. Local desert rocks and other evidence for ancient Warwickshire can be seen at the Market Hall Museum in Warwick”.