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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."
They've all migrated to Mars.
It's an inconvenient truth...
Where was Al Gore when Mars needed him? Guess it is too late to bring back the glaciers now. Damn Martian SUVs!
Now they are affecting other planets! we all have to stop driving them, they are killing the dolphins, and now the martians, this could start an interplanetary war!
Phoenix lands at the Martian arctic circle to poke around the icy soils there. It has a back-hoe arm and sophisticated chemical analyzers, but no wheels. It will last until the end of the year until the pole region enters the long winter night.
Then they might have to think and actually understand climate change! It's much easier to be ignorant and ridicule then it is to think.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ok, the comment might legitimately get modded up as funny, but how in the heck can someone look at it and decide that it is insightful.
You do realize this is talking about climate change that happened 10-100 million years ago? It could have been a very slow change over a million years. It could have been due to solar activity and Earth experienced the same thing.
Or maybe an asteroid hit mars, the resulting dust cloud blocked the sun and caused global cooling to the extent that glaciers were able to form (from what I don't know).
Using a trend that may have happened over a million years to invalidate theories about the cause of a trend occuring over decades is just plain dumb.
Not that I am making an argument for man-made global warming. It is just that this isn't the argument to use and attempting to use it causes you to lose credibility so that your future arguments are more likely to be ignored.
This should be one of those "back to the drawing board" moments for Mars climatology. How can you explain a change ice remaining so far south and then disappearing in the last 500 million years? A "Milankovitch styled wobble" might be one explanation, or perhaps good old fashioned solar forcing. But Earth is closer and would be subject to the same flux in any solar forcing.
But your main point is valid. Solar radiation is only one of the earth's heat sources. Internal radioactive decay contributes a lot, so does gravitational/tidal friction and the magnetic dynamo effects on the iron core.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I mean, the presence of glaciers on Mars 10-100 million years ago clearly shows that mankind has nothing to do with the sharp, upward spike in temperatures since the widespread adoption of fossil fuel power.
Clearly, the same forces that eliminated glaciers 10-100 million years ago are behind the changes of the past 150 years.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Malicious link, avoid.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"But Earth is closer and would be subject to the same flux in any solar forcing."
But Earth is closer and would be subject to a more intense flux in any solar forcing.
Inverse Square law, and all that.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Meet you Syrtis Minor! http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age_031208.html
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
We better do something quick because the temperature hasn't increased on Earth in 10 years. Maybe we are now going into an ice age and need to increase our CO2 production!
...
And then there is that inconvenient global warming occurring on Mars
It's okay. When it gets too bad we'll just migrate to another planet, like we did last time...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Liquid water was already proven to exist on mars. Photographic evidence showed flows lines that did not exist in 1 photograph existing in another. Can we please put this to rest once and for all? There is water on mars, and yes its in liquid form, and yes, somehow it surfaces and flows without evaporating right away.
The Gospel according to lolcat
Ice Ice Baby...
Hammertime! = No more glaciers.
And while we're here. Could a glacier exist on mars with its little gravity and no atmosphere? Obviously not; if there aren't any.
So what conditions have changed in the last 10-100 million years? The gravity shouldn't have changed - no large scale reduction in mass there. Probably no magnetic field due to no spinning around an iron core - this means an atmosphere that doesn't get blasted away by any sort of solar flare would be nigh impossible to keep up. There is next to zero atmospheric pressure on the surface (obviously) and the whole place is "frozen" due to extreme cold.
If anything, these structures/geological features seemingly formed by glaciers would have been formed more probably by a "glacial" type object but not made out of water. A different species of rock formation (for example a solid piece of granite in a tray of sand -- not this extreme) "floating" over millions of years across the surface - harder and more solid than surrounding soils and possibly pushed to surface by a rotational force. You'd see the remains on the surface as small rocks/boulders strewn over hundreds of kilometers.
But I'm getting fanciful; and this is all pure conjecture.
Break it down!
I just love throwing the fact the sun's activity matches our warming trends
I keep hearing this repeated yet all studies that I have read show that the amount of solar activity in recent times has very little affect on the Earths climate.
For Mars and to a lesser degree Earth one of the main driving forces for long term climate change is variations in their orbits around the Sun.
The orbit of Mars is very eccentric, with the orbit currently varying from 1.38 AU to 1.67 AU over a Martian year. Over geological time scales this changes quite a bit and has a large affect on long term climate change.
The same thing happens with the Earth. Right now summer in the northern hemisphere happens when the Earth is the furthest from the Sun. At other times this is reversed, This variation causes long term climate change. Also in both Mars and Earths case the orbits varies in eccentrically, also causing long term climate change. For Mars this is one of the main causes of climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html
you might not the conclusion: "70-90 years oscillations in global mean temperature are correlated with corresponding oscillations in solar activity. Whereas the solar influence is obvious in the data from the last four centuries, signatures of human activity are not yet distinguishable in the observations. "
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
An occasional large meteor may perhaps re-heat the surface, creating temporary but heavy flows of brine.
Table-ized A.I.
Please direct your attention to the record of global temperatures from 1880-2007.
Let's take a look at 1998 & 1999. 1998 was the third warmest year on record, with an average global temperature of 14.72 C. The following year dropped 0.26 C, and it took until 2005 to top that temperature at 14.76 C, with last year being 14.73 C.
OH NOES! GLOBAL WARMING IS TEH LIE!
1995 - 14.35
1996 - 14.46 (+.11)
1997 - 14.49 (+.03)
1998 - 14.48 (-.01)
1999 - 14.52 (+.04)
2000 - 14.57 (+.05)
2001 - 14.56 (-.01)
2002 - 14.59 (+.03)
2003 - 14.66 (+.07)
2004 - 14.68 (+.02)
2005 - 14.68 (+.00)
Do you see the clear, upwards trend once statistical noise is removed now?
P.S.: What inconvenient global warming on Mars?
Mars temperatures explained.
Also, please explain what common source could be warming Mars and Earth during the past few years when Total Solar Irradiance was on the decline from 2000-2005.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
No.
[citation needed]
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Okay, so I don't want to add my voice to the trollship, but the word 'recent' is a little bit ambiguous here. Whenever history of planets is discussed words like 'recent' and 'new' get overstretched.
would it not be clearer if we added a prefix to show exactly how recent an event was?
so you would have megarecent, gigarecent, terrarecent...
..only they're mostly covered with dust from dust storms.
Remember the patch of ice in a crater? It's supposedly up to 200 meters thick. On Earth, that would be a glacier. What else could it be?
according to Larry Niven's Rainbow Mars, it's Yggdrasil which caused Mars to die.
Joking aside, an excellent book.
No, people who reject anthropogenic climate change just think they're a lot smarter.
If you understood equilibrium systems, you wouldn't have asked how a tiny change in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere can cause significant climate change.
Actually, not understanding this kind of system is often the same problem creationists have -- it's the "how could complex life evolve via a random process" question.
Holy crap that website is fucking WACKY. And by wacky I mean bug-fuck insane psuedo-science just a scosh this side of time cube. Here's the titles of some other 'scientific' papers on that site:
"What Big Bang?"
"The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."
"Comet Caused Tsunami!"
"War in Heaven, War on Earth."
"Is Cassini a Kamikaze Deep Space Probe?"
Yeah, like I would EVER trust ANYTHING published on that site.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So, outside of the (American) political and religious ties between the two factions, there's quite a lot of similarity in mindset that goes behind both sets of beliefs which ultimately boils down to a distrust of science in favor of a gut-held, intuitive belief. How the 1% of a gas that humans produce of a gas that constitutes less than 1% of the atmoshere could be driving "global-bullshit-warming" is beneath intelligent thought, but then this IS
So if ozone can soak up this much UV-B and UV-C, why can't carbon dioxide and methane soak up some infrared? Again, not only have you ignored the real numbers (by saying 1% of 1%), but you've ignored evidence to the contrary that a very small concentration of gas can have a large effect on a particular spectrum of light because it "seems" illogical to your gut instinct.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
But those models don't support global warming, so lets just keep this a secret, shall we? Oh, sure. You'll "keep them a secret" because that might mean opening up your bogus data to criticism (assuming it actually exists).
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I will never vote for a candidate that robocalls me, period.
That was my policy too. And then they all started robocalling me! Republicans, Democrats, Ralph Fscking Nader, the Fscking Green party robocalled me! I didn't even know there was a Green Party outside of Europe!! Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. And it was fscking *February*! FEBRUARY!!
So now what? Vote for Ron Howard?
Before turning on the ancient device and getting thrown out of the domed habitat.
The data listed in your post reminded me of when I did a project on Brownian Motion in my Fractals class a few years ago. A good example is this image.
One of the interesting things of a curve like that one is that you can view it on any scale, and it will never smooth out. If you look at a window of size 1/128, you might see a clear downward trend, but if you look at a larger window over the same point of size 1/64, you might realize that was just a small blip on an overall upward trend, and on and on. In the graph I linked, at the end you are at the same place you started, but it would be hard to predict that by looking at a small or even a fairly large subset of the data.
Even if we were on a general warming trend with small dips on the way since 1995, that trend could itself be a small upward blip when viewed on the scale of 100 or 1000 years. That said, I've only looked at the global temperature record enough to say "hmmm... that certainly looks like it could be a subset of a Brownian Motion curve." I'm sure you've studied the issue much more than I and are much better qualified to argue whether global warming is a problem.
Your point about a "small upward blip" isn't without merit. If you extend the graph out far enough you will see that global temperatures have been on the overall decline ever since the Eocene, roughly 49 million years ago.
Of course, these changes happened over much longer time scale, with a much smaller rate of change than what's happening today. For a scale much more reasonable to looking at human influences, check out this graph. That is a scale that shows how much temperatures have shifted around within our local frame of reference. You'll note the regular up and down cycles of ice ages within this time period before a sudden upwards shift that shows something unusual is occurring. Currently our atmospheric CO2 levels are above those found in any ice cores to date -- 30% higher than anything found in the past 650,000 years. I think that's a little outside the local curve.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Interesting paper, unluckily when I look at figure #4 the discrepancy between the temperature curve and most others I have seen jumps out. eg look at the graphs here, http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/ most of which show much higher recent temperatures then Lassen does.
Further reading shows the same problems that lots of studies (both pro and con) of solar effects on global climate, selective filtering and using statistics (lies, lies and statistics in the words of Sam Clemens).
Anyways it did inspire me to do some more research and most authours are in agreement with Lassen up till the 20th century when the warming generally gets more and more out of phase with the solar cycle.
It is a real problem trying to find time to research this, there are a lot of variables, especially in the filtering methods.
Unluckily Lassen doesn't really show why varying solar cycle lengths would affect the TSI (total solar insolence) but it does appear you are partially correct. Part of the current warming trend is solar induced and I'd guess if the solar trend reverses then the warming trend will slow down and possibly stall for a bit.
The problem is we are still left with the fact that we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere at an accelerating rate and CO2 green house properties are pretty basic science.
Anyways thanks for the link to an interesting paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism