An animation showing a day on a living Mars.

Generated using data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter aboard the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft and satellite imagery from the Blue Marble Next Generation project. Sea level was set non-scientifically, but such that it would flood much of Valles Marineris as well as provide shoreline near the top of the cliffs on the outer edges of Olympus Mons.

The clouds are straight from NASA’s Blue Marble NG project and height mapped (rather arbitrarily, but looks good) by relative opacity

It has been speculated for quite a while now that at some point Mars may actually have had surface water, even its own oceans. What might that have looked like?

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