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

Inland sea?

[ObitMan]

with that amount of area wouldn't it be better referred to as an inland sea like the Great Lakes or the Black sea?

What does it really matter?

[olethrosdc]

I think I ought to summarize the current 'mars' situation. I don't have anything against exploring mars, etc, but it seems to me like people are trying to make worthwhile stories out of trivia.

I think we have been bombarded with the "news" of water on Mars for long enough so far. First it was the polar ice cape water residue, which was quite important. Then there was the hydrogen-trace confirmation, which is perhaps not so important, though it does show that there might be water close enough to the surface to be extracted. However this particular data is completely irrelevant unless there are plans to actually go there and extract water.

Now they have finished a high-resolution altitude map. They used this to calculate the possible origin of the water that shaped a valley, and traced it to something looking like a lake basin. Again, nice, since people theorize that if there were life on mars, there would be a higher chance that it had existed at a lake.

But, is this important? As far as I am concerned, the answer is no, unless someone decides to actually send a mission to the planet to gather hard evidence. Which currently seems impossible, considering the amount of money wasted on the ISS (which has no clear function IMHO).

Re:What does it really matter?

[Boiling_point_]

But, is this important? As far as I am concerned, the answer is no, unless someone decides to actually send a mission to the planet to gather hard evidence.

An awful lot of useful data is gained by remote sensing Mars - just like on Earth. You don't have to touch down in order to learn.

Different forms of matter have things called spectal signatures - the particular pattern of all the different wavelengths emitted/reflected. You can use these signatures to work out what sort of stuff rocks are made of, how old they are, what concentrations they're in and in what patterns they lie.

On Earth it's arguably more interesting, since you can tell different types of vegetation and settlement patterns just by measuring, say, the infra-red or ultraviolet you can see.

Research on Mars isn't about Martian life, all of the time. It's not even about terraforming and possible future human settlement - it's about taking science developed and theorised on Earth and applying it in new and challenging locations. By finding evidence of a huge body of water on Mars, we now know that all the theories of Martian geohistory (is that a word?) that rely on a small volume of past surface water are less likely to be true. This sort of stuff might be important in ways we don't know yet.

...it seems to me like people are trying to make worthwhile stories out of trivia.

Sure, plenty of people like to think of the possibilities and implications of teeny lifeforms sprouting up on a nearby planet. Fewer people, but they are out there, are just as fascinated by the basic interactions of huge universal systems and forces - of things on a scale millions of orders of magnitude bigger. Sometimes the news doesn't need to be dramatic, if you've got your eye on a bigger picture anyway :)

Re:What does it really matter?

[Anarchofascist]

... there might be water close enough to the surface to be extracted. However this particular data is completely irrelevant unless there are plans to actually go there and extract water.

I don't understand your lack of understanding. I'll try to put it into simple terms:

A: Water on Mars makes Mars more interesting to visit, because where there's water there is/was life.
B: Water is to rockets what petroleum is to cars.

Therefore, these discoveries make Mars easier to return from, and make it a more interesting place to visit. Therefore it is more likely that one or more countries (probably the Chinese at this rate) will want to pay to send people there.

Evidence of Tidal Lock

[smallduck]

Richard C. Hoagland and friends have some odd theories, but one of them has been somewhat predictive along the lines of this finding. The theory is that Mars was in tidal lock in the not-too-distant past, ie. that it used to be a moon of a larger planet (which exploded or something).

Predicted by this theory: the distribution of underground water-ice at the equator being primarily in two areas 180 degrees apart. This is what was found, and funny thing, these are apparently areas of high-elevation, not low-elevation.

Also predicted, climate change on Mars due to cataclismic event as opposed to a slow decline. Such a rapid event would cause exactly the sort of thing described in this mars lake article.

Another good prediction: the 'stains' visible in Mars orbiter pics that look like liquid water on the surface, in fact are liquid water leaking to the surface. Others poo-poo this idea because they say Mars climate change was geologically ancient, and if water was leaking to the surface as frequently as the pics suggest, it would all be gone by now. Hoagland's theory says the climate change was relatively recent (millions of years), so this really is water and its not all gone yet. Look for this to be found next & lets see if the standard model can survive.

www.enterprisemission.com

Richard C. Hoagland is coincidentally is on the Coast to Coast AM (yes, Art Bell's radio show) tonight, not discussing this topic however (hmm, Speilberg producing TV miniseries about what??)

This isn't news...

[Cally]

it's olds for nerds... images from as far back as Pathfinder showed conclusive evidence of catastrophic outburst floods. That's why Mars Odyssey carries the gamma ray spectrometer which is tuned to look for the hydrogen signal from subsurface water in the first place.

From the fringe

[Alien54]

Of course, elements from the fringe have been arguing there is/has been water there for ages. It seems that it is only now the the official scientists are starting to say "well, there could be", or even "look at our new discovery."

Examples of how strange this get are seen here. Ignoring the junk science nonsense, the pictures are interesting. If you scroll about halfway down, there is one mars photo, conveniently linked to the nasa archive, that looks for all the world like an actual sea shore. So much so it is startling.

Of course, the real scientists are taking their sweet time coming to any conclusions (insert plausible reason here), which is driving the hobbyists and others right up a wall.

Re:the bible was right...

[Arthur Dent]

Probably loose karma for this, but I can't let this slide: You said:

>So why are there fossillized sea creatures on top of Mt. Everest?

You don't need a flood to put fossils on top of Mt. Everest. Mt. Everest formed when the Indian continental plate rammed into the Asian continental plate. That collision raised the sea-bed to the height it is now.

In fact, Mt Everest is still growing (at about 2 cm/year).

>Just from the earth's magnetic field rate of decrease alone,
>there is ample evidence for a very young (~6000 years) earth indeed.

You do know that the earth's magnetic field periodically reverses itself don't you? see http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/amag.html for more information.

>Why object to something that has hard scientific evidence like Po halos [halos.com]?

Mmm, maybe because it is *not* hard or scientific? See: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/gentry.ht ml for more information.

-- ITIHBT (I think I have been trolled).

Biblical "truth"

[DG]

(We seem to be in agreement on the issue of the danger of fanatics - of any stripe - so I promise not to beat you up too badly :)

But the issue of Biblical "truth" is an interesting one, because so many people's concepts of what "Biblical truth" actually *means* are so different and so contradictory - often self-contraditictory.

If I understand your position correctly (and I agree that text is not a perfect communications medium), you believe:

1) Everything in the Bible is True

2) Mistakes may be made in translation, such that a False version of what was once a True statement may appear in later versions.

3) Even given a perfect translation, people may (intentionally or accidently) misconstrue what a passage actually means, and so the version of the passage as it exists in their heads may become False.

I agree wholeheartedly with statements 2 and 3 from the above summary.

Now let me make the following observations

1) There are some parts of the Bible that are very obviously False - the Earth was not built 6 days, for example. The four Gospels (which all discuss the same events) often contradict each other on dates, places, and sequences of events.

So there are passages to one can point to and state "this is False" and other passages one can point to and state "up to three of these may be False, but we don't know which"

2) Given the lack of access to early copies (which may not necessarily track the original texts themselves) and the lack of ability of most Christians to read the ancient languages (usually Greek) in which they were written, most people must thus read the Bible in the translation to their native language, and thus get the full force of any translation and copy errors.

This in turn means that in their copy of the Bible, there exist passages which are not the same as the "True" Bible, and so are False.

3) For a given person, there is some level of probability that they will misconstrue a given passage at any given time, and so their "internal model" of the passage becomes False.

When you tie this all together, this means that:

1) for a given passage, there is some probability that the passage is False

2) You have no way of determining what that probability is

This means that _every single passage in the Bible is suspect_!

How can one choose to base a life, make decisions, or answer questions, based on the contents of the Bible, if there is no way to know if the answer is True or not?

DG

Re:Biblical "truth"

[DG]

Thanks for the well thought reply.

No problem.

As you can probably tell, I am an athiest. I was raised Roman Catholic (and so got the full religious education) and I came to atheism once I was on my own and free to think for myself. I have a lot of sympathy for the religious, in that I understand full well how difficult it is to let go of stuff that was taught to you as (heh) gospel truth for most of your whole life.

The earth could have litterally have been built in 6 days. There is no way to prove or disprove this. Or, the context in which the word "Day" is described does not mean a literal 24 hour day.

Well, you can't have it both ways.

As it sits right now, the word ancient Greek word that has been translated as "day", meaning "a 24 hour period". Certainly that is the interpretation that is commonly accepted.

If "day" does NOT mean "a 24 hour period", but rather "some period of time very much longer than 24 hours" then the common use of the word "day" in Genesis is an ERROR - a faithfully reproduced, painstakingly copied ERROR.

It is, of course, possible that God snapped His fingers, and the Earth came together complete with a fossil record and the evidence of very long term geological processes. As such, it is impossible to disprove, in a scientific way, that the Earth was not created in 6 days.

At some point you have to make a decision: given the massive amounts of evidence that show that the Earth was created millions of years ago and then slowly acquired life through natural processes, does that not make more sense than an Earth created in a mystical fashion in an unnaturally quick timeframe, complete with falsified evidence of a natural creation and the slow development of life?

If you are of the camp that believes that God triggered the Big Bang and then sat back and watched His divine plan unfold, fine. That is a much more reasonable Creation story, as it allows all the scientific evidence we have to date to remain True. But if you *are* of ths camp, then Genesis is in error, and at least one portion of the Bible is FALSE.

I wonder why the Gospels are picked on so much.

Mostly because - unlike the Old Testement - the Gospels provide four independant accounts of the same events. There is no "Book of Moses according to Levi", "Book of Moses according to Samuel" etc so it is harder to show that given Old Testament passages refer to the same event (if indeed they actually do)

But the Gospels refer to the life and actions of the same guy, who incidently is supposed to be the Son of God (and so what he says and does is core to Christianity)

If the Gospels contradict themselves on so much as one fact - say the date of the birth of Jesus - then at least one of them is False on that fact. If there is one Falsehood, there may be more, and you have no way of determining which passage is False or not.

Which is another way of stating that there is no way to tell is a given Biblical passage is actually True.

I'm not the first person to ever state this. Many, many learned scholars throughout the history of Christianity have struggled with this concept, and great and amazing feats of logical gymnastics have taken place in order to rationallize these logical problems away. But notwithstanding great efforts at rationalization, the core problem remains: how do you trust a book that contains known false statements, given that there is no way to independantly test any of these statements outside of the context of the book?

It is very, very good that you are seeking the Truth, but Truth is a very slippery fish indeed. It is one of the core tenets of science that determining Truth is very difficult, that you have to be prepared to provide excellent evidence of given would-be Truth, and you have to be ready to accept that today's Truth may well be disproven tomorrow. The "Truth" of science is a fuzzy, nebulous concept that you at best glimpse out of the corner of your eye from time to time. But it also maps very well into the real world.

Ask yourself this: "Why do I insist on the existence of God and the Truth of the Bible?" What purpose does it serve? Seriously. Think about this. Meditate on it. And see if you can answer yourself truthfully. I'd be interested in what you discover.

DG

Re:And plenty of code space for more.

[Psiolent]

It is little wonder that the brightest minds on our planet didn't/don't belive in a God, both Einstein and Stephen Hawking have both said they see no room for such an entity in the universe.

I've never actually heard this before (though I don't necessarily doubt it). Do you have any quotes or references for these two where they said something to that effect?