Mars may be around 140 million miles away from Earth, but the red planet is influencing our deep oceans by helping drive “giant whirlpools,” according to new research. Scientists analyzed sediments, drilled from hundreds of deep-sea sites over the past half century, to look back tens of millions of years into Earth’s past, in a quest to better understand the strength of deep ocean currents. What they found surprised them. The sediments revealed that deep-sea currents weakened and strengthened over 2.4 million-year climate cycles, according to the study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. Adriana Dutkiewicz, the study’s co-author and sedimentologist at the University of Sydney, said the scientists didn’t expect to discover these cycles, and that there is only one way to explain them: “They are linked to cycles in the interactions of Mars and Earth orbiting the Sun,” she said in a statement. The authors say this…
