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

So that's where the Glaciers have gone...

[Anonymous Coward]

They've all migrated to Mars.

It's an inconvenient truth...

Where was Al Gore when Mars needed him?

[vortex2.71]

Where was Al Gore when Mars needed him? Guess it is too late to bring back the glaciers now. Damn Martian SUVs!

Re:Where was Al Gore when Mars needed him?

[Anonymous Coward]

Al Gore was too busy driving a hybrid taxi in New York City in the not-too distant future.

Re:Where was Al Gore when Mars needed him?

[ppanon]

Silly. Al Gore wasn't born yet.

John McCain on the other hand, could have done something but instead accepted the claims of martian corporate lobbyists that evidence for martian climate change was inconclusive.

next Mars probe lands on May 25, 2008

[peter303]

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.

Re:next Mars probe lands on May 25, 2008

[techno-vampire]

It has a back-hoe arm

How much do you want to bet that within the first week it will cut a fiber-optic line and cut part of the Martian backbone?

Re:next Mars probe lands on May 25, 2008

[boris111]

I wondered about that. It's intending to dig in icy areas right? How do they know it's won't be too icy as in they won't be able to get the hoe in the ground

Re:next Mars probe lands on May 25, 2008

[CraftyJack]

Ice is the goal. There's no such thing as "too icy" here. The scoop has a rasp on the end of it that will be used to grind some of the icy soil into the scoop. The robotic arm will then dump those ice shavings into the analysis instruments (TEGA and MECA).

Re:Trolls are too fast

[geekoid]

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.

Solar forcing or new climate model required?

[SockPuppet_9_5]

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.

Re:Trolls are too fast

[Valdrax]

Let me make the obvious point that this news is in no way an argument against anthropogenic climate change, not in the least because they're talking about events that are MILLIONS OF YEARS OLD. Bull. Everyone smart enough to know that climate change isn't caused by mankind knows that the universe isn't more than a few thousand years old.

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:global warming

[BiggerIsBetter]

It's okay. When it gets too bad we'll just migrate to another planet, like we did last time...

Re:global warming

[Lars T.]

it has to be man made. the sun and natural effects couldn't possibly change the weather! Nope, it was Martian made, and they died out 100 million years ago because of it. Repent, sinners, for you repeat the sins of GOD's first try!

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?

Stop babbling talking points and look at the data.

[Valdrax]

We better do something quick because the temperature hasn't increased on Earth in 10 years. You're clearly wrong. It takes a real lack of understanding of statistics to think that you can't have a cold year or two and still have an overall warming trend. This is what happens when you confuse short-term weather trends for long term climate shifts.

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!
 
...Right? Well, no. It you look at the graph on the linked page, you'll see that there's *definite* upwards trend in spite of strong variability from year to year. If you take a 5 year average, centered on each year, you get the following trend:

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.

Re:mods?

[funwithBSD]

WE don't know the Sun is getting hotter? Is that you and your little mouse?

Maybe he can read this to you really slowly:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_030320.html

In what could be the simplest explanation for one component of global warming, a new study shows the Sun's radiation has increased by .05 percent per decade since the late 1970s.

The increase would only be significant to Earth's climate if it has been going on for a century or more, said study leader Richard Willson, a Columbia University researcher also affiliated with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The Sun's increasing output has only been monitored with precision since satellite technology allowed necessary observations. Willson is not sure if the trend extends further back in time, but other studies suggest it does.

"This trend is important because, if sustained over many decades, it could cause significant climate change," Willson said. Oh right... inconvenient truth.

And might I remind you, we have better records of the Mars Ice Caps, going back to Galileo, on what the caps used to look like. They are shrinking.

Without human intervention.

Re:Did you see the pictures?

[JetJaguar]

Umm... No. The current presence of liquid water has not been confirmed. The best evidence that we've found so far is actually not inconsistent with a dry flow down a steep hill. The flows could still be water, and that can't be ruled out. However, it has not been confirmed.

The fact is, all of us really want there to be liquid water on Mars, it will be a major break through if and when it happens. However, no matter how tantalizing the images are, they still don't confirm the presence of water....yet.

I think the glaciers might still be there..

[jlehtira]

..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?

They're the same, really.

[Valdrax]

Creationists and those who disbelieve man-made climate change are at opposite ends of the intelligence spectrum. I don't see the difference.

• Both require an out and out dismissal of global scientific consensus by experts in the field in favor of widely discredited fringe theory largely promoted by outsiders.
  
• Both require an inability to see how small changes can have large effects over time.
  
• Both ultimately dismiss the physical, geological record as unreliable.
  
• Both consider small anomalies to be more important than the overwhelmingly larger data set and then cling to them as proof of their alternative views even after the larger scientific community figures out how to explain them.
  
• Both frequently blame scientific consensus on conspiracy, bias, and groupthink instead of being willing to credit experts for actually knowing the material better than them, all while ignoring their own self-blinding bias and groupthink.
  

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 /. Why is that so hard to believe? I mean, ozone is only 2-8 ppm and yet without it, surface UV-B levels would be about 350 billion times what they are, and UV-C is almost completely blocked. All this is done by a layer of gas which is dwarfed in volume by CO2 (384 ppm currently, a 30% increase over preindustrial levels).

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. ...A lot like a creationist feels about evolution.