Evidence Found of Lake, Catastrophic Flood on Mars

angkor points to this article on spaceflightnow.com, excerpting: "Scientists 'have discovered a large former lake in the highlands of Mars that would cover an area the size of Texas and New Mexico combined.'"

Comments

Re:Razing Arizona

[umrgregg]

Dumb science abounds today... Your friends are very wrong. People need to start learning science form scientists and not from their sunday morning sermons.

A lot of water was trapped north of the grand canyon in a huge lake. After some time, the dam holding the lake burst and the entire lake carved the Grand Canyon out of the soft sediment in a geologically short time (hours to months).

Nope. This doesn't even justify a geologic response. There is no global scale geologic evidence for a catastrophic flooding of the world a la Noah. Sorry.

Over the next thousand or so years the sediment hardened into the stone we see today

Compaction and lithification of sediment does take a bit longer than a thousand years. Especially the volume of sediment found in the colorado plateau.

One was how you can see the same rock strata all the way around the canyon. They claimed if it was formed over millions of years, much of the land would have shifted and the strata lines would not be so straight.

Not really. The sediment found in the colorado plateau represents the cumulation of billions of years of deposition and erosion. You have to realise that the colorado plateau was not always a basin collecting sediment, but was also a part of a huge Jurrasic desert (JR Navaj for geologists), an even bigger sea that connected the present day arctic with the gulf of mexico (albeit North America was a bit closer to the equator :) and uplifted to form the plateau we see today--just to name a few.

The strata in the canyon may appear flat, but like your friends hypothesize there is evidence of tectonic events--although a basic understanding of depisitional priciples could help understand some of their questions.

Another bit they pointed to was the closed clam shell fossils. They claimed clams open when they die and closed fossils are evidence of a catastrophic event.

Plenty of bivalves die with their shells closed. While modern clams tend to die open, it is not unheard for them to die closed even without a catastrophic event. Even so, the 'clams' of the canyon--which are often misidentified as such--had no problems dieing closed, or open. Who know what they did hundreds of millions of years ago? Go gather some samples from Redwall Limestone, or was it Toroweap, and identify them with an Autobann Society's guide to North American Fossils book. I bet you they aren't 'clams.'

Personally, I don't know enough about geology to support or refute the theories, so I tend to believe the mainstream scientific theory.

You know a bit more now. 'Modern' geology answered all of these questions a hundred years ago. Mainstream science is still science, and I have never seen a paper published or personal evidence that indicates what your friends believe. If they would open their eyes and look around instead of accepting on blind faith, they would come to many of the same conclusions geologists came to a century ago.