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UCLA Scientist Discovers Plate Tectonics On Mars
Reader SternisheFan links to a press release at UCLA, and excerpts from it another bit of Mars news: "For years, many scientists had thought that plate tectonics existed nowhere in our solar system but on Earth. Now, a UCLA scientist has discovered that the geological phenomenon, which involves the movement of huge crustal plates beneath a planet's surface, also exists on Mars. 'Mars is at a primitive stage of plate tectonics. It gives us a glimpse of how the early Earth may have looked and may help us understand how plate tectonics began on Earth,' said An Yin, a UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences and the sole author of the new research."
...for the followup papers by other scientists examining his findings before I make a conclusion. I have a friend who actually is a planetary geologist and focuses most of his attention on Mars, and I haven't heard any of this from him.
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I always found it odd that Mars' southern hemisphere would be so much higher than the northern one. This discovery means it might be simply a supercontinent that will be, in spite of its size, a transient[*] feature.
I'd like to hop on a time machine, go forward 200 years and read up a book on the geology of Mars. I wonder if they'll name previous continents (assuming they can be determined) by a system that uses names from famous Mars-related stories. The first bunch of continents named after features in the John Carter of Mars stories, another bunch taken straight from Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, et cetera.
[*] In a geological time scale, of course.
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- Sledge Hammer
Maybe we now know what happened to those canals... damn earthquakes!
Or would they be marsquakes?
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I would guess the exact opposite. What I've read is that the theory is that Mars lost its atmosphere and electromagnetic field due to the core of Mars cooling and solidifying. IIRC it's core stopped spinning or slowed as well.
Shouldn't this mean that as Mars ages tectonics slow to a halt? For example, if the layers under the Earth's crust cooled, solidified and stopped rotating, isn't the theory that Earth will end up looking a lot like Mars in the far away future?
One would expect this with Martian vulcanism.
What the hell happened to Venus? It's about 80 percent of the earth's mass. Why on Venus wouldn't it have a plate tectonics? Just because you can't see it happen doesn't mean it's not there.
"For years, many scientists had thought that plate tectonics existed nowhere in our solar system but on Earth."
Why would anybody that is a legitimate scientist think that? They might not think any place else has evidence of it yet, but that's distinct from believing it exists nowhere else.
While the existence of tectonics on Mars is interesting in its own right, the really fascinating question is whether it is still continuing today. Yin seems to jump to the conclusion that it does without much data to back it up. I would like to see some measurements examining Martian tectonic movements. It shouldn't be that hard, we can already do that with centimeter precision here on Earth. If Mars turns out to be tectonically active, that would mean it still has a hot liquid mantle and it's not the cold dead planet we tought it was.
The reason why we have precise measurements is because we have 30 satellites in extremely precise orbits that are carefully measured and corrected, which broadcast GPS signals all day long. There is really no practical way of getting a system like that in place now or in the foreseeable future on Mars.
It would beg the question of where the magnetic field whent though...
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Forgive me, IANAPG but didnt Mars cease to be geologically active long ago. Which is why we see no active volcanoes and very little atmosphere (no shielding from solar winds). Also, if earth is the only planet with active tectonics why is Venus literally covered with active volcanoes and an atmosphere thousands of times denser than earth?
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Its used to earthquakes.
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I would like to see some measurements examining Martian tectonic movements. It shouldn't be that hard, we can already do that with centimeter precision here on Earth.
No problem, Boss. I'll just pop over and get those for you. Back in time for tea!
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Venus also has volcanic activity without a magnetic field.
The reason why we have precise measurements is because we have 30 satellites in extremely precise orbits that are carefully measured and corrected, which broadcast GPS signals all day long. There is really no practical way of getting a system like that in place now or in the foreseeable future on Mars.
It probably wouldn't be that hard to get a system with LORAN level resolution now. There's just no use for it. Any rovers around now can just use existing Mars orbiters to get a position.
Hasn't it long been assumed that Mars had plate tectonics in the past? Because it's a smaller planet and lacks a large moon, its mantle has cooled and plate tectonics has stopped. Then its core cooled, its magnetic field weakened, and its atmosphere was blown off by solar wind...
Unless I missed something, it looks like this is based off of geographical features looking like features on Earth. Is this really definitive?
Then we can expect volcanoes, release of more CO2, melting of ice, and the creation of a denser atmosphere. This is indeed intriguing.
That's not that astounding of a claim to make. There are only a handful of antes in our solar system that are rocky, and there wasn't necessarily evidence to support plate tectonics on those other planets. Now, if the claim had been that there weren't plate tectonics anywhere else in the galaxy, then yes, that would be quite a bold claim.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
1) The Fine Article states that Mars is in a primitive stage of plate tectonics without explaining what that means. Whether it's in an early and developing stage or it never progressed beyond a similar stage in Earth's early history because its core's motivation is insufficient are unexplored possibilities, at least within the context of the linked article.
2) What indicates that these observations show 150 years of tectonic activity? (Oh, and would these be Terran or Martian years? We don't actually have 150 years of observations of the surface of Mars with sufficient detail to allow a researcher to derive actual data, do we?)
An inquiring mind at Slashdot is stymied once again.
THAT'S what you'd do if you could travel into the future?
You must be fun at parties.
Its what? :P
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marsquakes
Why not just support human life extension research? Or at least human reversible hibernation... Time travel is not possible.
We knew of plate tectonics long before we had that kind of precision. OTOH, we knew of it because of intensive geological explorations.... which is also impractical on Mars for the near future.
Why not just support human life extension research? Or at least human reversible hibernation... Time travel is not possible.
Of course it's possible, but only forward, and only at the rate of 1 second per second.
This space unintentionally left blank.
The elevation map showing the alleged "split" crater in the valley is not very convincing. Is there other evidence that the two halves are really a crater, or is the claimant over-matching faint patterns?
Over-matching faint patterns has a long track record with Mars, where they used to "see" linear canals thru Earth telescopes. Turned out to be observers who were over-connecting the dots.
Table-ized A.I.
Why would anybody that is a legitimate scientist think that?
Because in serious science, being wrong is not a crime. In fact, the first person to state "we have no evidence for X, so we must assume it does not exist" often get's the credit for setting some student or other off to prove him wrong. Just remember, the true crime is being "not even wrong". Try to be wrong at least once a day; then you might learn something. The only condition is that you have to realise that you were wrong.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Maybe if it was tectonic plates .... but plate tectonics definitely sound "faulty".
Time travel is not possible.
How do you know that?
Why not just support human life extension research?
Because this kind of research 1% highly speculative, unlikely to be developed in my lifetime technology, although one that could be the greatest single technological advance ever, and the other 99% is bullshit sold by con artists
And here's the key: I'm not sure I'm qualified to tell the difference between the two.
Imagine what the scientific establishment would have said back in 1912, had Alfred Wegener proposed this then.
I've been working on a time machine. I've got it to the stage where it can make small jumps into the future. Right now it can go one minute ahead. You just get in, sit in the chair, and press the button. It's not (yet) instantaneous, though. It takes about 60 seconds to complete the trip. I just need some more funding. Look for my kickstarter project soon. If it passes the $100K level I'll put in a more comfortable chair, which would open the way to longer journeys.
Why not just support human life extension research? Or at least human reversible hibernation... Time travel is not possible.
Of course it's possible, but only forward, and only at the rate of 1 second per second.
Well, you can go forwards as much as you like, up to a limit since your craft can never reach light speed since it has mass. Just accelerate in an arc away from the earth at a constant 1 or 2 G on a trajectory that will eventually bring you back to the start for 10 years. When you land you've travelled much more than 10 years into the future.
True, but the passage of time itself is dependent on gravity.
Theoretically, you could decelerate time in a certain 'bubble', say by 1/1000 .
Living inside this 'bubble' 1 year, would be a 1000 year outside the bubble, allowing you to travel forward in time.
I don't usually reply to my own posts but here's another interesting thought.
These thoughts are giving me the willies. Time to get my kids off this doomed rock.
We don't have the technology to pull it off but it is possible. You can orbit a black hole and time would slow down by about 50% or travel at 99.x% of the speed of light and slow down time by a truly significant amount (1 year of travel at full speed and about ~100 years would pass outside the vessel). Logic suggests, however, that time travel is only possible forwards and never backwards in time due to the grandfather paradox. In any case, some truly remarkable spaceships would be needed to pull it off, and I'm sure it would take us centuries to develop the actual tech.
My point is - time travel is possible albeit not today.
One Earth plate tectonic boundaries are defined by lines of earthquakes. One of the Viking probes had seismometer. But it did not see motion other than the wind.
Pardon my ranting, but I'm a graduate student in planetary geology working on Mars, and this sort of thing annoys me. The news article implies some things that are just silly. That's because of the journalist though, not the science.
Mars has asstons of faults (yes, that is the technical scientific term). We've known for decades. The article makes it sound like Dr. Yin discovered that Valles Marineris is a fault system... We've _also_ known that for decades. See the abstract for http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1977/JS082i028p04067.shtml , published in 1977. First sentence: "The Valles Marineris, an enormous canyon system spanning more than one quarter of the equatorial girth of Mars, exhibits in its landforms the consequences of uniquely Martian extensional tectonics and a variety of erosional and depositional processes."
Extensional tectonics, notice. Yes, like Death Valley. You don't need full-scale global plate tectonics to create these sorts of features, either. There have been plenty of other theories about its origin because that's what scientists do; we've wondered for decades whether Valles Marineris was REALLY a fault system or whether there could be some other process going on, because going and actually looking in detail is hard. But that's science for you. "Valles Marineris is a fault system" is a pretty old idea and you'd have to go pretty far to find a Mars scientist who didn't think it was broadly correct.
But journalists keep misunderstanding. Scientists come up with piles of ideas for how things COULD work. Something that seems like it would result in what you see, and that fits with what you think you know about the rest of the planet, or physics problem, or whatever. Then many people in many different disciplines look at their work and say "sure that makes sense" or "no I don't believe it", and the field as a whole slowly wobbles its way towards consensus (or doesn't, at the case may be). Sometimes new information makes it clear that everything we thought we knew was wrong, though it made sense at the time. Or often it just confirms that we were right all along, or says that the general idea was right but we were missing some details. For Mars we very little information, so lots of people tend to say "It COULD work this way", and there's not a lot of basis to say "No, probably not".
The difference between Mars and Earth is that as far as we know, on Mars there was no _global_ process like plate tectonics that defined the structure of the entire planet. There were plenty of _local_ processes, like the volcanos of Tharsis or rebound of the giant impact of Hellas and such. Dr. Yin's work is actually pretty cool because he's saying that things are more complicated than just straightforward local effects, and you can recognize some trends that are large-scale enough to start to look like the sort of global processes that Earth has. He's saying things like Valles Marineris is not _just_ a rift created by the Tharsis rise stretching the crust, but there's some amount of strike-slip or twisting component to it that which suggests that alone is not the complete story. It might get more eyeballs looking for these sorts of features, and maybe we'll find more things that start to outline plates. Or maybe not! But we'll never know unless we look.
But Dr. Yin has not "discovered plate tectonics on Mars". He has discovered what he thinks is evidence for something that looks like plate tectonics on Mars. Could he be right? Sure! Could he be wrong? Quite possibly. People have certainly looked for this sort of thing before, and found lots of different evidence, like the magnetic striping mentioned elsewhere in the comments. But there's not enough information to put it all together into an idea and say "This is how it works, it explains what we see, and other ideas don't, so we're pretty sure this one is right".
Mars is at a primitive stage of plate tectonics.
Yeah, fuck you mars, you're crappy tectonics aren't nowhere near as goods as ours, and don't even think about copying our plate movements because we're patenting them.
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He knows his stuff, even if he came from U$C. :)
Yeah, right.
If , as is generally agreed, Mars is somewhat older than Earth, and was stripped of it's atmosphere and lost it's magnetic core in it's death throes, then it's plate tectonics wouldn't be at a "primitive" stage, but an advanced state of entropy, essentially.. having slowed down due to cooling of the interior of the planet.. Since it's generally conceded that the first two conditions on Mars occurred, then what kind of scientist would compare the third condition (plate tectonics) to an *early* stage? It's ludicrous..
You can orbit a super-massive black hole (like the one at the galactic center) and slow down time significantly.... but at the cost of not just massive exposure to radiation but also tidal forces that would rip your legs and head off your body even while technically outside of the event horizon (thus still in theory capable of leaving).
Travel at 99.9x% of the speed of light has other similar health risks where the background cosmic radiation can through blue shifts in frequency turn into deadly radiation... much less any star light that was formerly in the visible light bands when traveling at that speed. Collision avoidance of any "dark" objects would be tricky too, like any wandering comets or asteroids much less planet sized objects in interstellar space. Heck, smashing into something the size of a walnut would not be pretty, although that would be mostly a part of that same radiation hazard at that speed.