Evidence Of Glaciers On Mars Suggests Recent Climate Activity

Last year, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured high-resolution images of the Red Planet which showed many mesas, valleys, and rock debris which appeared to be (geologically speaking) recent formations. A team of scientists from Brown University analyzed the photographs and found evidence that the terrain was carved by large glaciers much more recently than they thought possible. Climate activity on Mars was thought to have quieted over 3 billion years ago, but these glaciers would have been around within the last 10-100 million years. "The finding could have implications for the life-on-Mars argument by strengthening the case for liquid water. Ice can melt two ways: by temperature or by pressure. As currently understood, the Martian climate is dominated by sublimation, the process by which solid substances are transformed directly to vapor. But ice packs can exert such strong pressure at the base to produce liquid water, which makes the thickness of past glaciers on its surface so intriguing."

Comments

Re:mods?

[regularstranger]

I don't think any climatologist says that climate change cannot occur if humans are not involved. Please correct me if I'm wrong. What climatologists say is that human actions do contribute to climate changes here on earth, and that this may involve repercussions that at least should be considered and planned for. It is not a counter-example to anything that I am aware of, and the original comment is not insightful at all, and I didn't laugh when I read it, so why it gets any mod is beyond me. Now commence calling me an enviro-knucklehead.

Re:mods?

[Rei]

Let's ignore that this was incredibly slow change. Let's pretend that tomorrow, we read in the news that Mars has warmed ten degrees in the last twenty years. Let's pretend that this isn't made less relevant by the fact that mars has an atmosphere with a small fraction of a percent as much thermal inertia as ours, and there's no even bigger oceanic thermal inertial source (the ocean) like we have on Earth. Let's pretend all of this was true for the sake of argument.

It Would Still Be Irrelevant As To The Causes Of Climate Change On Earth.

We have satellites, telescopes, and sensors monitoring every last thing you could possibly imagine about the sun. Unless the sun has some sort of magical powers, if the sun is changing in some way or another, *we'd know about it*. We don't need "planetary proxies" to tell us if the sun is getting brighter or whatnot; we have the hard data *right here*.

Oh, and for the idiots who just assume that the IPCC scientists forgot to consider the sun: there are about 50 peer reviewed papers summed up in the technical report (pretty much every recent peer-reviewed paper on the subject) related to the sun, changes in the sun, historical changes in the sun, how the various forms of solar radiation interact with earth processes, and so on. Now, how many of them have *you* read that lets you feel qualified to hold a contrary view?