New York, Nov 22 (TIWN) Analysing data collected by NASA's Curiosity rover, scientists have found that floods of unimaginable magnitude once washed through Gale Crater on Mars' equator around four billion years ago.

"We identified megafloods for the first time using detailed sedimentological data observed by the rover Curiosity," said co-author Alberto Fairen, a visiting astrobiologist at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.  "Deposits left behind by megafloods had not been previously identified with orbiter data." As is the case on Earth, geological features, including the work of water and wind have been frozen in time on Mars for about four billion years. These features convey processes that shaped the surface of both planets in the past.