The current image of Mars is a barren and harsh desert, which is completely opposite to the history of water on the planet's surface.
Canals, minerals modified by water and many other geological traces show that in the early stages of formation, Mars was once a much more humid and dynamic planet.
How to recreate the process of this rich water environment disappearing on the red planet remains one of the major challenges of planetary science.
Although some mechanisms explain part of the water disappearance from Mars, the fate of most of the water on this planet remains a mystery.
A new study by an international scientific group, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment on February 2, 2026, has helped researchers take another important step in decoding the mystery of Mars.
For the first time, scientists have demonstrated that a local dust storm, with strong intensity but limited scope of impact, can push water vapor up to the upper layers of the Martian atmosphere in the summer in the Northern Hemisphere. The previous summer was thought to have negligible impact on the water loss process on Mars.
This discovery shows the impact of this type of storm on the planet's climate evolution, and opens up a new approach to understanding how most of the water on Mars has lost over time," said Adrián Brines, a researcher at the Andalusian Institute of Astrophysics (IAA-CSIC, Spain), co-author of the study, along with researcher Shohei Aoki of the Pioneer Sciences College, Tokyo University (Japan) and the Sciences College, Tohoku University (Japan).
Dust storms have long been considered an important factor in the water loss process of Mars, but previous studies mainly focused on planetary-scale storms.
Meanwhile, new research shows that smaller regional storms can also significantly increase the process of transporting water vapor to high altitudes, where water easily escapes into space.
Previous studies often focused on the warm and volatile summer in the southern hemisphere of Mars, which is considered the main stage of dehydration on Mars.
This study recorded unusually high water vapor in the average atmosphere of Mars in the summer in the Northern Hemisphere during the 37th year of Mars (corresponding to 2022-2023 on Earth), caused by an unusual dust storm.
At that altitude, the water level is 10 times higher than normal. This phenomenon has never been observed in previous Mars years and has not been predicted by current climate models.
These results add an important piece to the unfinished picture of Mars losing water for billions of years, and show that short but intense events can also play a significant role in the climate evolution of the red planet" - researcher Aoki concluded.
