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Ancient Flood Channels Cut Deep Into Mars
astroengine writes "Relatively recently, water blasted out from an underground aquifer on Mars, carving out deep flood channels in the surface that were later buried by lava flows, radar images complied from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe shows. The channels are at least twice as deep as previous estimates for Marte Vallis, an expanse of plains just north of the Martian equator that is the youngest volcanic region on the planet. "We see similar channels elsewhere on Mars and they are not filled with lava so it's important to be able to compare different channel systems, and also similar systems on Earth, to give us clues about how they formed," lead researcher Gareth Morgan, with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, told Discovery News."
to the first person who likens these to the erroneous "canals".
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Mars looks like any earthly desert.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Did anyone else read "Ancient Food Channels"?
Recently. So just a few weeks ago water was gushing all over Mars. When they are really ready for people ot populate Mars, they will claim to have found huge deposits of gold.
Am I the only person bored with the obsessive focusing on Mars by people desperate to find life? Maybe mars had life in the past but now its a dead dustball. There is more change of life in the ice moons of the outer solar system as they have oceans NOW. A few more missions to them and a few less to mars might be a better use of scientific resources.
They aren't talking relative to human history. They are talking about the geological history of Mars, which has several distinct periods that cover billions of years. And for that 500 million years is fairly recent.
If you don't like this phrasing, I strongly recommend you don't talk with geologists, planetary scientists, or astronomers. All of them would consider something that happened within the last 500 million years to be fairly recent.
I knew there were ancient civilizations on Mars, I knew it! And Food Channels would line up nicely with the end of civilization. What? Oh, never mind.
If you don't like this phrasing, I strongly recommend you don't talk with geologists, planetary scientists, or astronomers. All of them would consider something that happened within the last 500 million years to be fairly recent.
I wouldn't consider that to be "pretty recent", but that might be because I'm influenced by the geological history of Earth. We know quite a lot about it; it's been quite rich since then due to all that tectonic stuff, and the further you go back in time, the fewer traces of progressively more ancient history you find. That creates an information imbalance of sorts and although I do realize that numerically, 500 Ma is the last ten percent of the time line, it's still the most interesting part for us. I guess it's just psychological.
Ezekiel 23:20
What saddens me is that Mars Express was sent by the ESA and is orbiting Mars as we speak carrying RADAR for just this kind of thing (MARSIS). How many times have we seen their results in the news? I expect the next time there's a good idea for a Mars mission it'll struggle for funding because non-one remembers anything good coming from Mars Express. I'm sure there's plenty of really good science going on, but we never hear about it.
We just can't get our PR act together over here.
>>Relatively recently
>>Ancient
Does not compute.
The words "ancient" and "recent" are basically antonyms.
were there rover tracks beside the outbreak?
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Nope; "recent" is correct. This is a major finding since previously it was thought that Mars was freeze-dried to a crisp 3-4 billion years ago. 500 million is recent on this time scale and a bit revolutionary.
>>Relatively recently
>>Ancient
For once, the Slashdot headline is actually more sensible.
You have to read three paragraphs of TFA to find that "relatively recently" means "500 million years ago". It's only "recent" in comparison to the other, billions of years old, water channels previously known.