Around 60% of people claim to enjoy a good old beach holiday, and in the hustle and bustle of modern life, it’s easy to understand why.

With the sun on your back and the soft sand underneath you as you close your eyes and relax, only a gentle breeze and the sound of the waves gently lapping on the rocks of a nearby cave and a gull overhead for company, you can finally unwind.

And we’re lucky on earth. The particular topography of our land masses means that coasts are relatively easy to find, with sandy beaches occupying around a third of the world’s 356,000km of coastline.

That’s a lot of sand, a lot of sea, and a lot of tranquillity.

But in surprising news from Penn State University, had we only existed a few million years ago, another destination could have been added to our beach resorts of choice – and it would have only been a rocket trip away.

That’s because, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, data secured from China’s Zhurong Rover (which traversed Mars’s surface for around a year between 2021-22) suggests that not only did Mars once have water on its surface, beach-like areas and other factors may have been capable of supporting life.

Penn State’s Benjamin Cardenas, who co-authored the study, explained the clues that they discovered in the university’s statement:

“We’re finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas. We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand — a proper, vacation-style beach.”

But how can the researchers be so sure that the appearance of Mars’s surface confirmed the ancient presence of water?

Well, this was all down to the technological capabilities of the Zhurong rover.

With special radar, the rover was able to scan what was going on below the Red Planet’s surface, including gathering data on the rock formations that were buried under Mars’s unique, dusty red floor.

And, as Cardenas confirmed, it was the structure of the underground deposits on the radar data – in particular sloping, tidal formations known on Earth as ‘foreshore deposits’ – that clued them into what could have once been a great Martian ocean:

“This stood out to us immediately because it suggests there were waves, which means there was a dynamic interface of air and water. When we look back at where the earliest life on Earth developed, it was in the interaction between oceans and land, so this is painting a picture of ancient habitable environments, capable of harboring conditions friendly toward microbial life.”

After comparing the data captured by the Zhurong rover with similar data procured on Earth, the international research team were able to piece together the reality of a planet with surface water and, potentially, life-sustaining capacity.

Their study is just the beginning. As Cardenas explained, their discovery of a potential Martian beach destination is a huge step toward the search for past life on the surface of our planetary neighbor, as well as our understanding of its landscape and climate over billions of years:

“We’re seeing that the shoreline of this body of water evolved over time. We tend to think about Mars as just a static snapshot of a planet, but it was evolving. Rivers were flowing, sediment was moving, and land was being built and eroded. This type of sedimentary geology can tell us what the landscape looked like, how they evolved, and, importantly, help us identify where we would want to look for past life.”

Given science’s preoccupation with finding other potentially habitable planets – and SpaceX’s plan to put astronauts on Mars – this discovery is only adding excitement to the quest.

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