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A New Angle on Martian Methane
dusty writes "A recent hypothesis paper entititled 'Martian CH4: Sources, Flux, and Detection' delves into the production of methane on Mars. This hypothesis compares Mars with South Africa, and draws the conclusion that the radiolysis of martian ice and water while reacting with carbon dioxide can produce enough methane to account for recently observed concentrations.
Methane is important because it is hard to explain. It has a short half-life and must be replenished frequently. As recently as 2005 the public line from NASA/JPL was that the methane could be produced by volcanism. Mars' dormant Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system but auspiciously quiet. A recent study from NOAA throws into question the whole idea stating, 'If Mauna Loa is a valid terrestrial analog, our findings suggest that volcanic activity is not a significant source of methane to the Martian atmosphere.'"
as anyone with 3 male roommates can testify to.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
All that looong summary and no mention of the most interesting posibility: that the methane is life-generated by bacteria and the like living under the Martian soil.
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The term can be applied to anything which decays with time, though radioactive decay would probably give the most attractive decay curve.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
According to the article (first paragraphs even...), Methane is chemically broken down by sunlight over a few hundred years.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
It's been awhile since biology class, but I'll do my best.
UltraViolet radiation/light breaks down the Hydrongen bonds in Methane (CH3) thus 'destabalising' the molecule.
Mars has no ozone layer too, (which blocks a large % of ground-level UV)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
It just goes to show that Martians like beans... A lot.
Nope. Its "the most powerful". While they might cover the same surface area, Olympus Mons stands much higher.
The concept originated in the study of radioactive decay, but applies to many other fields as well, including phenomena which are described by non-exponential decays.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
"'If Mauna Loa is a valid terrestrial analog, our findings suggest that volcanic activity is not a significant source of methane to the Martian atmosphere.'"
Man, I wish more of our scientific quotes sounded like this one. It lays it out straight and simple. Here is our source of info: analogy with Mauna Loa. Here is our assumption: we can project info from it onto Olympus Mons. Here is our conclusion: there is something else other than volcanic activity producing methane on Mars. I like how all that info was neatly packaged into a simple sentence. I also like how he admits the assumption... if. The thing that comes to mind are all the dinosaur shows explaining their day to day lives, zodiac signs and favorite take-out places.
Uhm. Since always? Science is the whole idea of making a (thought out or not) statement, and then setting about disproving it. If you fail to disprove it, you end up with the 'last option is that it's true' idea.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
I agree totally and welcome our new bacterial overlords.
Science, particularly in the US, seems to be slipping back into its old habits. Dogma reigns supreme and dissident voices are quashed without cause or concern simply for going against the norm.
A friend of mine used to argue that science was no different from religion, and scientists a new breed of priest. I hated his argument, but lately I have had to question how valid that may be.
The question to ask then is, why would life on Mars recieve such scathing denials from the scientific community? Who benefits from from perpetuating the belief that there can be no life on Mars?
Surely if one applies occams razor to the question, we must believe strongly in the possibility that Mars does indeed have the capability of supporting some forms of primitive life. This is especially easy to believe when one considers some of the habitats where life has been found here on earth. Buried thousands of meters in rock, volcanic vents 6Km below the suface of the ocean and boiling lakes of acid...
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would be seriously dumb as CH4 is a much more potent greenhouse gas than C02, and stockpiling it would harder than just stockpiling the CO2 in the first place.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
> "Who benefits from from perpetuating the belief that there can be no life on Mars?"
The most logical answer is just "common sense." It's been universally accepted that Mars is a barren planet for hundreds of years (mice in telescopes and canals aside). That builds a lot of inertia to overcome by anyone that wants to come along and change that belief.
The other possibility is a roadblock that The Mars Society and The Mars Underground ran into a couple of years back. Their goal is to get NASA to Mars and eventually begin terraforming and colonization but a lot of there supporters turned on them when they realized they might destroy any life native to Mars if we completely re-engineered the martian environment.
This inevitably lead to a wikipedia entry dedicated to it.
Well you probably wanted to say intramolecular C-H bond instead of hydrogen bond, which is a kind of intermolecular bonding...
Hydrogen bonds certainly can be intramolecular. Intramolecular hydrogen bonds are a significant part of what holds a folded protein in its shape.
Shouldn't you be doing something useful?
It's called: Remarkable claims require remarkable evidence.
Science isn't about believing anything is possible until proved otherwise. I think many scientists would agree that it's possible there is or was life on Mars. But life evolving independently anywhere other than Earth would be a major breakthrough for science, so they want to be very careful about claiming it until it is really, unquestionably proved. IMO this is just good science.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
Didn't Thomas Gold postulate that we'd find lots of methane on Mars? He had many intriguing theories on "deep life" - and recent evidence of "replenishment" of petroleum reserves, IIRC, while puzzling to geologists following the standard theories, would not have been a mystery to him.
I don't know for sure, but intuition tells me you'll get a CH3- anion, and a H+ cation. Not sure though, you might get a carbocation...
.H
It's a "homolytic cleavage"--they split as two radicals:
H3C-H ---> H3C. +
Shouldn't you be doing something useful?
The term can be applied to anything which decays with time, though radioactive decay would probably give the most attractive decay curve.
You get the same curve from anything that has a probability of decay that is independent of time.
If the probability of decay, destruction or loss for an individual atom is L per unit time, then for N atoms the rate of change of N is:
dN/dt = -L*N
and integrating gives N = No*exp(-L*t) where No is the number of atoms at some arbitrary t=0.
So for any situation where you have a constant decay probability you will get the same curve. For methane in the Martian atmosphere the rate of decay is pretty much constant due to solar ultra-violet radiation breaking up the molecules. Therefore, if there were no source the amount of methane in the atmosphere would drop exponentially.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
While radioactive elements give a more attractive decay curve, Methane smells more like decay, and is thus less attractive to those with curves.
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