Slashdot Mirror
Martian Sea Discovered
mpesce writes "New Scientist is reporting that a large sea of frozen ice (between 800 and 900 km in size and 45 m deep) has been discovered by the ESA's Mars Express Probe. Here's the kicker: the sea of block ice is only five degrees away from the Martian equator. New Scientist also links to a PDF of a paper to be presented next month about the finding." Update: 02/21 15:30 GMT by T : Note: that's 45 meters deep, not 45 kilometers deep.
A large sea of frozen ice??
:)
As opposed to the other kinds of ice, like liquid ice or gaseous ice?
Here's your sign...
Awesome, though. I can't wait for us to terraform Mars, and start our new civilization there.
And eventually ruin that planet as well.
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
Not like the kind we get here, then.
That's 45 meters deep, not kilometers.
That's 800km by 900km (i.e. 800km wide and 900km long). It isn't between 800km and 900km!
they have not detected any form of frozen sea, they have merely found some peculiar formations that they hyopthesise may be blocks of ice covered in volcanic ash (which has prevented it subliming into the atmosphere). Another hypothesis is that these formations may have been caused by lava flows.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Woot!
err maybe not, still not enough information but I tell ya all those stories I read growing up seem a little closer now - Edgar Rice Burroughs maybe was a little off in his vision of the planet - but Kim Stanley Robinson or Aurthor C. Clarkes visions may be in reach now. With water on the planet , and it being accessible to us gives any future mission to mars a valuable resource.
I'm 'pumped' so to speak.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
"(between 800 and 900 km in size and 45 km deep) "
;)
:)
According to TFA the depth is 45 METERS deep, not 45 KILOMETERS.
There is quite a difference between the two...
I didn't think so either...
The team of researchers, led by John Murray at the Open University, UK, estimates the submerged ice sea is about 800 by 900 kilometres in size and averages 45 metres deep.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
... is a bewildered and gasping Arnold Schwarzenegger waiting for the nuclear heating coils to kick in.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
In other news, Michelle Kwan has announced she will be training for the 2006 Olympics on a secret "remote" location, devoid of paparazzi.
Insiders say she also aquired a new sponser, an undisclosed candy bar manufacturer..
...if we melt the water. And my tounge in cheek Mars Hydro website may well fortell a commercial future too? :-)
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
The
Here's the title of the article:
./ posting:
...that a large sea of frozen ice (between 800 and 900 km in size and 45 km deep) has been discovered...
./ poster even RTFA?
'Pack ice' suggests frozen sea on Mars
Here's the summary of the
Do
Now astronauts (or kosmonauts or taikonauts or whatever gets first over there) don't have to take ice with them if they want to have a whisky on the rocks.
Hmm... maybe I could start a first "bar galactica" and make tons by selling spacetourists stiff drinks at high rates.
"Joe, one lump of frozen ice in my drink if you please!"
He's just colonizing in the name of the Drexciyan Wavejumpers.
RIP James.
-mkb
Well, you see, the whole attraction of mars is that people can go there, terraform it, and then greenhouse the shit out of it and say "Well it was a barren waste land anyways".
Mars will be the Las Vegas of environmental concerns!
I could just picture first detailed images of the sea coming back with a frozen martian with a slightly suprised look on its face frozen under the ice. :-)
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
It wasn't too long ago that the guys from the Science magazine compiled their list of the 10 most important breakthroughs of 2004. Ranked 1 were the Mars rovers. For all I remember, Mars Express delivered probably at least as many new insights, if not more, but it was notably missing in that list. Why's that? Just because it doesn't have wheels to drive around, or is it the lack of an american flag on its side? Or what exactly is it that puts the rovers into a league of their own?
Seen the movie Total Recall?
looks like someone needs to activate the martian oxygen maker thing.
Arnie Quotes
"Consider that a divorce!"
"Get your ass to Mars...get your ass to Mars..."
"MY NAME IS NOT QUAID!"
"If I'm not me, who da hell am I?"
"That's the best mindf___ yet."
Sustainability and energy independence essay
What I want to know is...just how big of a splash can I make on a planet that has less gravity of Earth.
Life is not for the lazy.
From some random site, the volume of Earth's oceans is 1.3*10^9 km^3. That's roughly 40,000 times as much water as what was just found on Mars. Inferring the existance of even more water on Mars, and taking into account the fact that Mars is smaller than Earth (surface area of Earth is ~ 6.65 times that of Mars?), you might say the avearge ocean depth of Earth is at most 6000 times greater than that of Mars. Not too friggin bad, let's terraform this sucker.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
It's amazing to me that the submitter could make three errors in the first half of the first sentence of his submission.
It's not between 800 and 900 in size, it is 800 by 900.
It's 45 meters deep, not km.
Frozen ice? Well, duh.
it's powers of observation and recounting as keen as these that make eye witness testimony so compelling.
"No one would have believed in the first years of the 21st century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than Martians' and yet as mortal as his own; that as Martians busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a Martian with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency Martians went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of Martian danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most Martian men fancied there might be other men upon planet three , perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this mars with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And to mars in the 21st century came the great disillusionment."
I wonder if Martians can ice skate? If so, perhaps we could import them here and have a hockey season. Imagine ESPN's ratings for the Mars Cup!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Good point. I love how the slightest hint of water - which could mean something else - is taken as iron clad proof that there is water on Mars. Remember when sediment was found at the bottom of basins on Mars, and they thought that was their proof? Frankly, I'm waiting for them to bring back a pitcher (of water).
http://209.235.176.54/1741.pdf
Its temp webspace for www.foxcheck.org. Have fun. And we want to live in peace with our /. overlords!
Who came with that stupid idea to name a planet after candy bar, anyway? That's outrageous!
Since when were km french? You must mean your TheRestOfTheWorld-to-BackwardsAmericanWay cheat sheet. Notice how all science stuff is in metric, it makes more sense (Powers of ten).
So one imperial meter is the same as a metric millimeter. I gotta remember that...
In other words the sae was frozen and had a lot sediments in it. As the surface evaporated the sediments were left on top. The sediments in conjunction with vlocanic ash effectively inusulates the sea underneath it.
Its kinda like an aquifer, except that in this case the aquifer is frozen!
If we could terraform Mars, do you really think it would be hospitable? There's more to Earth than water and oxygen that makes it possible for life to live here. The moon, for instance, is just in the right position to affect our tides so they aren't out of control. And the magnetic field that helps move that nasty radiation around us... I wonder what it would mean for Earth if we terraformed Mars, changed it's magnetic field. It might even effect life here. I say we leave Mars alone before we kill ourselves.
- Tylo
Here's the kicker: the sea of block ice is only five degrees away from the Martian equator.
I have to admit I don't know a lot about this yet... but why is it such a "kicker" that the ice is so near the equator?
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Mars isn't flat, and the area of the sea surely isn't square, but a very rough estimation of the volume would be: 800,000 meters * 900,000 meters * 45 meters = 32,400,000,000,000 cubic meters = 8,559,174,460,226,494 gallons or in words 8.6 quadrillion gallons or 32.4 quadrillion liters.
AccountKiller
To say nothing of the mass hysteria that occurs when the words "life" and "mars" are randomly strung together in the same sentence, then repeated secondhand to an over-eager journalist.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
about the age of the ice pack. Estimated at 5 million years by crater impact aging. If Mars had water 5 million years ago on the surface then it may had a atmosphere then also. And if it had a atmosphere just as long as earth did until 5 million years ago then there could of been life on the planet and advanced life at that. We've seen microbes on ancient mars rocks so it's entirely possible there was life on mars but to what extent we cant see. Maybe storms or whatever stripped mars of it's atmosphere erased any visible signs from the surface such as vegetation.
FTA: Images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express show raft-like ground structures - dubbed "plates" - that look similar to ice formations near Earth's poles, according to an international team of scientists.
If it is indeed frozen H2O like in Antarctica, there is a possibility that it also contains liquid water within the ice. To the surprise of explorers, that was found in Antarctica.
I tried to find a link to that information but I couldn't find anything good. My source is this Antarctica documentary
I wonder what the temperature variation is on the Mars equator. Theoretically, how would that temperature variation affect a body of water of that size?
1st it is warmer near the equator, so... so that would be a nicer place to live.
2nd if it can exist near the equator, it might also be found in the colder areas.
850m^2 * pi * 45m is 102,141,031m^3, which is 2.7E10 gallons. Ice is 107.5% the volume of its water mass, 2.5E10 gallons. Which is about 15-20% the size of only one of the NYC upstate reservoirs. Perhaps documenting the process by which this ice collected and buried will explain whether there was any other water, and where it went.
--
make install -not war
Isn't the much more important mistake that they don't actually know that it's water?
SPORTS ILLUSTRATED:
A new hocky team is in town. Despite the ongoing lockout, the NHL has announced a new expansion franchise awarded to the Martian Terraformers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
As exciting as the discovery is, The Slashdot summary reads like it's a done deal.
Actually, the article linked starts out with this (note the word "may" in the 1st sentence):
"A frozen sea, surviving as blocks of pack ice, may lie just beneath the surface of Mars, suggest observations from Europe's Mars Express spacecraft. The sea is just 5 north of the Martian equator and would be the first discovery of a large body of water beyond the planet's polar ice caps.
Images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express show raft-like ground structures - dubbed "plates" - that look similar to ice formations near Earth's poles, according to an international team of scientists."
"You're drunk with your tradition that has no validity I'm intoxicated with support for metrics come drink a decaliter with me we want metrics want want it now or we know we can't win I weigh 170 pounds that's 90 kilograms see metrics can even make you thin"
You know, your idiotic attempt to slam Bush would have been better if you spelles KETONES correctly.
I mean, how can you be an anti-Bushie if you can't get your facts straight?
Wait, that's the first requirement for anti-Bushie membership? Oops, sorry.
Everyone knows that nature is static, and how things were 50, 100, or 1000 years ago are the way that they should be today, tomorrow, and forever!
The reason why large scale or long-term changes to the environment are so risky is not, as you mistakenly state, that nature is static. Rather, it is that nature is highly dynamic on time scales spanning millennia and we don't understand the dynamics yet. A significant change that we think produces benefits may, in the long term, have devastating consequences.
Once we understand natural systems sufficiently well to be able to predict the consequences of our actions in the long term, then we can engage in deliberate planet-wide engineering efforts, here on earth on on Mars. Until then, anything that alters our atmosphere, oceans, or ecology significantly is Russian roulette.
I thought they had deployed the radar boom and discovered the Ice, but it turns out these are theorized findings from visible light photos. And it appears NASA doesn't agree totally with this. WTF? Why do the Euro's argue with us on every damn Mars thing? I mean how many times have they been to the Red Planet, oh I forgot, this is like their first FREAKING time.
When they deploy the MARSIS boom and verify this stuff, then I will crack the bubbly.
We can strip mine the rest later!
Best Slashdot Co
You forgot Newater, you insensitive clod!
...since there's nothing there to get put out by any mistake, except dust, rocks, and wind.
The confirmation that a large body of frozen water exists on Mars is excellent news for any future manned missions to the planet. Its presence means that Human beings could sustain themselves for much longer periods of time without the need to transport gallons of water for use when they get there. With the addition of green houses it is even possible that water might be of vital use in growing food for consumption on the surface of Mars.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
any such program for agitated copious breathing which required a partner would never, ever happen as long as the people came from Slashdot. ;-)
Sustainability and energy independence essay
"We still don't have the missing link that Darwin himself said you better find before you even start thinking about calling this theory fact."
h tml#morphological_intermediates_ex3
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.
Would you please review your "Blue Collar Comedy" tape for the proper use of "Here's your sign"? You're supposed to have a sarcastic remark in counter to a stupid question. I'll bet your programs take FOREVER to correct for syntax... if you code, that is.
My point is that actual use of units doesn't involve paper--and it doesn't involve unit conversion.
If it doesn't involve unit conversion, then your point about how much easier it is to cut a quart into cups is meaningless. No one unit is any better than any other, so the only way one of our systems can have an advantage over the other is in terms of unit conversion.
If it did, units better amenable to conversion would have been derived a lot earlier.
Decimal units had no advantages before there was agreement on a decimal, positional number system. The old units that were based on 12th, 16th, 24th, and 60th came about long before the Indian/Arabic system became standard in Europe. Yes, they are older, but that doesn't make them better any more than Roman numerals are better than Arab.
It's just another Enlightenment flim-flam.
Right. Like critical investigation, scientific method, human rights, and modern democracy!
I hate to be rude, but bullshit.
Your problem is not rudeness (I don't mind), it's that you're wrong. It's not "impossible" to eyeball a fifth, that's ridiculous. Why would it be? But more importantly, I know aproximately how much a deciliter is, just like you know aproximately how long an inch is, without having to take it out of a foot.