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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."
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.
You know, I reckon these might be canals, that Maritans used to get water from the shrinking icecaps at the poles to the drying cities in the more temperate zones. What do you think?
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.
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.
And that lava was probably from their rocket-ships taking off when they left the planet to colonize earth. I'm pretty sure I saw the ruins of Atlantis in one of those pics...
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.