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Evidence For Liquid Water On a Frozen Early Mars
Matt_dk writes "NASA scientists modeled freezing conditions on Mars to test whether liquid water could have been present to form the surface features of the Martian landscape.
Evidence suggests flowing water formed the rivers and gullies on the Mars surface, even though surface temperatures were below freezing. Dissolved minerals in liquid water may be the reason."
Whatever happened to the "looks-like-a-liquid" that was evaporating from the soil where one of the rovers was scraping?
Is it possible that mars was warmer at a time? Either with a high level of CO2 or some other greenhouse gas that would have warmed the surface enough for running water? Maybe a little more dramatic but maybe even a slightly closer orbit?
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
We've so many things to learn from our red neighbor. I hate to put my tin foil hat on this early in the day, but I oft wonder how much data has been retrieved/analyzed/hypothesized upon that we (mouth breathers at-large) have not been made aware of. There are some tantalizing possibilities with Mars, both to learn of our past and to help forge our future. Like Buzz Aldrin, I think whomever the first Mars pioneers wind up being, they should not plan on returning...
Without giving the scientific method a nod, it easy to say 'of course there's water on Mars...duh!', but I still await the slam dunk chemical analysis. Too many things fool the eye from a distance, like so many men/women from across the room...
Wow, another speculative article from someone one what COULD have been. I wish one of these days NASA would give me more than models, simulations, possibilities, and probes that are SUPPOSED to reveal actual conclusive evidence but which never do.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Give this people eyre!
Let's just send some water over there and call it quits and go to Io, Europa or Ganymede
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
Scientists concluded that salty liquid water on Mars may explain the stability of fluids against freezing on the Martian surface at temperatures below 0C
No! Really? That's completely well... unsurprising...
I always wondered why we spread salt on the road in wintertime, turns out it helps melt ice. Thanks for spending valuable research money to clear that up NASA!
There are however, three real mysteries here:
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
But if there was salt in the water, there was probably also life in that water. Life living in the salty water making it saltier by pissing in it every single day.
The thinking that brines may keep the water on Mars from freezing is not a new conclusion-- here ( http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/153110701753198927?cookieSet=1&journalCode=ast ) is a discussion of the concept from a few years back.
And, of course, the fact that the Opportunity rover found the Meridiani Planum site to be covered with evaporite deposits (mostly sulfate salts) contributes a lot...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Is it possible that mars was warmer at a time? Either with a high level of CO2 or some other greenhouse gas that would have warmed the surface enough for running water?
Yes, that's a good summary of the current scientific thinking. The Viking orbital images show a lot of the surface is sculpted by water-carved features, and the belief is that Mars originally has a much thicker carbon dioxide atmosphere, which provided a significant amount of greenhouse warming (*). With the loss of Mars' magnetic field, this thick atmosphere was slowly eroded away by the solar wind to the very thin atmosphere we see today.
Maybe a little more dramatic but maybe even a slightly closer orbit?
No, that's quite unlikely. Planets are hard to move.
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*Footnote: The media likes to pretend that there is some controversy about the fact that carbon dioxide produces greenhouse effect warming (because controversy sells newspapers), but in the science community studying planetary atmosphere, there is no controversy whatsoever. It is just physics.
If you search hard enough, you can find somebody who disagrees, and quote them, and say, "look, not all scientists agree!" And since this is /. I'm sure somebody's about to do that: the miracle of the internet is that these fringe thinkers have just as loud a voice as people who have actually stufied the subject. But nevertheless, the greenhouse effect is just physics. And relatively simple physics.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I've wondered the same. I would like to think it is just because the budget to do the real stuff just isn't there.
Somebody needs to get those guys at NASA a glass of water already.
I don't find the speculation very interesting or new, either, and I will add that since they have no complete knowledge, and a way to verify, the planet could have been covered in fudge and cellophane.
More scientifically, I could say that there are so many dimensions in the NULL space of that matrix that selecting one of infinite possible vector solutions is just silly^(n-r).
And you forgot:
You know, water isn't the only liquid in the universe. Other things can form rivers.
I'm not going to see any Mars terraforming efforts in my lifetime, am I?
That sucks. Why are we so slow?
Actually, the pivotal factor is the great flood. The truth is we (human beings) were created by God within a 7 day period etc etc... BUT the original home for us was MARS. Hence the drastically different life spans, physiological discrepancies (giants and other deviations)and the environment.
Having completed this beta phase and learned some valuable lessons, God took the opportunity to launch His RC on Earth and implement the necessary changes to continue development (see changelog commonly known as bible). Noah and family are the first true astronauts, having been relocated during the "40 days".
The methods of relocation employed by God resulted in the de-mobbing & moth-balling of Mars - traces are there but not the ones we are expecting...
err, you get the idea... So, can we make a movie or what?
(fire alarm testing all day today... the bells are making me craaaaaaaaaazy)
The current theory is that a lot if not most of the water on earth came from water comets bombarding it after it had solidifed and cooled enough so that the water didn't just boil away out of the atmosphere.
I guess if in a salaried environment and 'not nitpicking and actually having something useful to say' were built into a package you'd say something more useful than the above.
I was thinking of TOTAL RECALL (1990) the instant I saw this story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Recall
Moderators, please cut posters some slack if they make a post with the tiniest of on topic content.
I actually got a chuckle out of the parent post when I saw it. :D
Where is the salt that life is pissing into the water coming from? Pretty sure it would come from the salty water as well. This would mean the water would not get saltier as more life pisses into the water. Not saying the rest of your statement is wrong, but the life making water saltier seems to be circular logic.
However, someone else made the point that the current theory is that Earth received much of its water from "magical" water comets. I seem to recall that many of them are made of ice, now what does ice melt into again?
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
Not saying you're wrong, but where does the water in the comets come from? If it can form in comets, isn't it also possible that water is a common compound which can form anywhere conditions allow (i.e. the presence of hydrogen and oxygen and a catalyst to fuse them)?
The comet theory is interesting, but it also begs the question.
As for the salts, the additional minerals would come from the metabolic processes of the life. The life grows by absorbing sunlight (or something) and ingesting the riverbed minerals. The minerals are then released into the water as the lifeforms rid themselves of waste. It isn't a closed system.
My understanding is that water is a relatively common compound, but the problem is that oxygen and hydrogen (esp. hydrogen) are light and therefore less likely to survive the creation of a rocky inner planet. A planet is formed from the outcasts of matter from a forming star. The heavier elements converge toward the center and the lighter ones get pushed out. Any water that is not blown away from the rocky planet by solar winds and such are boiled away by the hot, forming planet. These less-dense materials get pushed further out and freeze. They eventually form into ice-comets that over billions of years crash back into the now-cooling planets, helping to form the atmosphere and oceans of inner rocky planets.
I would have thought the absorption of water-soluble salts and minerals by the water itself would have more of an impact on saltiness than life ingesting the minerals and then releasing them. Then again, I am not a biologist so maybe there are some salts produced by living things that do not occur otherwise. I would think in this case that there would be no freshwater lakes as they are teaming with life. Maybe I am misunderstanding though.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"