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Researchers Solve One Of The Biggest Mysteries About How Water Flows On Mars (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Not only is water flowing on Mars, it's also boiling. This experiment published today in Nature Geoscience solves one of the major mysteries about the surface of the red planet. Gizmodo writes, "Researchers built a chamber simulating the conditions and atmosphere of Mars, then put ice in there to melt. The ice did melt and the water from it flowed -- but there was also a surprise. The surface of the water boiled as it flowed, and that boiling was strong enough to move not just the water but also dirt and debris surrounding the streams. Importantly, temperature was not the major factor in this boiling water, it was due to the pressure of the atmosphere." You may remember pictures of flowing water on Mars which surfaced last year. One would think the summer temperatures should be too cold for water to flow on Mars (as seen in the images), however, the water that flows on Mars is a salty-brine which lowers the freezing point of the water. So how does the water manage to carve out the landscape so quickly and visibly? Easy: the boiling water theory. Boiling water hits a boiling stage along its surface, where it kicks up dust and dirt and debris in the water's wake. The research team did see the boiling water move debris, but they also saw collapses along the sides of the flows. The boiling and disturbance it causes etches those lines on Mars clearly enough for satellites to notice them.
You read the title, maybe even the summary. You then went through the trouble of writing a comment. Which means it did affect your life a little bit.
Well at least we can start working on apparatus for distilling fresh water from in situ martian brine...
Greed is the root of all evil.
There are some that think many of their fellow humans are crazy and dangerous and might just destroy the planet unless one of many of the possible and thankfully rare extinction events doesn't get us first. Watch a Trump circus or North Korean news reel if you think they are delusional. They are at least studying the feasibility of taking a few of our many eggs and putting them in another basket. Having water is the first key to survival. Knowing that human life on Mars can at least be possible should give you more hope for the long term future of mankind. This affects me in a meaningful way and it might have the same effect on you if you think about it.
Greed is the root of all evil.
How does water flowing on Mars affect my life or anyone else's in a meaningful way?
Your life doesn't matter. Neither does anyone else's.
Only humanity matters. And its continuity strongly depends on its understanding of how other planets work.
If you die tomorrow and that makes humanity advance a thousand-millionth of a day in its search for expansion, that would be a good net result.
Humanity matters exactly as much as any single human. i.e. not at all.
temperature was not the major factor in this boiling water, it was due to the pressure of the atmosphere
Facepalm material.
This is not intuitively obvious to people who memorized PV = nRT in grade school *HOW*?!?
Who was this exactly a mystery *from*?
The causes of level differences on Earth are mainly plate tectonics, volcanoes and the spinoff known as the moon. Water didn't cause any of these. Actually water causes erosion that levels the terrain. It didn't cause the ocean floor to sink. You've got it completely wrong.
If salty brine is part of the boiling water effect on Mars, then after the water disappears, there should be white streaks in the satellite pictures that show where the salt was deposited. The sat sensors should be able to pick up this mineral to confirm that the boiling water consists of a salty brine. I didn't see any white streaks to indicate the path of the water in the picture with the residual being the salt.
. . . which direction does Martian water flow when you flush the toilet . . . clockwise, or counterclockwise . . . ?
How does water flowing on Mars affect my life or anyone else's in a meaningful way?
This could affect your life if you are flying to Jupiter, and stop to take a dump on Mars.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Humanity matters exactly as much as any single human. i.e. not at all.
I disagree. I believe humanity has a tiny chance of transcending what we currently call the universe.
I feel there would be meaning in that transcendence.
Ooh, get you, Mr Important. It affects you about as much as your inane post affects me.
If you find it so aggravating to find your eyes assaulted with headlines about advances in planetary science, kindly piss off elsewhere, or at least STFU.
Simpler question: why the hell did you post in the first place?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
You, him and Elon Musk, surprisingly enough, are not the population on which the importance of discoveries is based.
Great post! With the way you wrote that comment, I can't tell if you're posting that crap to make a humourous contribution or if you actually believe that conspiracy-theory nutter! Well played.
Unless, of course, you were serious about your post. In that case, I pity you.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
Or, it can allow you to rationalize further trashing this planet.
What you're saying is basically, "Knowing that you'll get 27 virgins in the afterlife should give you more hope..."
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you ever come across negative gravity where things travel uphill do be sure to let us know won't you.
Keep taking the meds fella. I'm sure you next appointment with the doc is not far away.
Course, in the meantime you might want to figure out how NASA are bouncing signals off mars too fool all those non governmental orgs and other countries who are picking up the signals too. Oh, wait! They must be in on it too! I bet its the Bilderberg Group eh??
I don't trust many governments. But I do trust in basic physics and the impossibility of virtually every country in the world with a science program being in on some conspiracy to fake a robotic mars mission that most of the public frankly don't give a shit about anyway. It would be harder to fake than actually go there.
Don't forget to watch the loons trying to shut down trump rallies. I despises Trump but the anti-free speech, anti-freedom of assembly scum trying to shut down the events are many times worse.
If there isn't freedom of speech then the only alternative is violence.
"There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order."
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
He has a legitimate point. It's news for nerds, but perhaps not stuff that matters. "Stuff that matters" is pretty subjective though. It might matter to someone.
I thought it was 72 Virginians.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it's cold as hell.
We may have to wait a hundred or thousand years for this flowing water in Mars baby to grow up. Or it might not grow up. But you never know which baby born today is going to grow up like the mighty giant Faraday's baby grew up to be.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You do know the violence originates with the Trump supporters as a direct result of Trump publicaly encouraging exactly that, not the people who peacefully protest at his rallies.
How does water flowing on Mars affect my life or anyone else's in a meaningful way? Can anyone give me an answer? I'm betting nobody can.
This news gives you a heads-up that once you move to Mars, you're going to have to make some serious altitude adjustments to your cake recipes.
"How does water flowing on Mars affect my life or anyone else's in a meaningful way?"
No, water flowing on Mars does not affect the lives of AC trolls in any meaningful way.
You might be right, but I think people who will trash the planet will find may ways to rationalize their actions.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Indeed it was Faraday's baby. But it took Nikola Tesla to do anything useful with that baby. Scientists always point at Faraday who found the physics that made Tesla's work possible but ignore that physics didn't enable much beyond pipe dreams until Tesla came along. Neil himself skipped right over Tesla in Cosmos.
Nobody had the kind of intuitive understanding of the physics first seen by Faraday that Tesla did, and their true potential no just for AC current in wires but in the air, possibly nobody has since either.
Those pictures are really amazing. You can see the channels grow in the sand as the snow melts off the mountains.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I wouldn't there is too much international collaboration in the space program and nobody is going to be willing to admit they are the country that couldn't detect the rover. All said though, yes it is much less likely than a conspiracy within our government and between it and official bodies and corporations.
Anyone who doubts the possibility of a conspiracy in the US after the Snowden leaks is off their rocker not even so much because of what was leaked (although that was plenty bad) but because of the response after it was leaked. Including the bill passed that was supposed to put a stop to it but actually just legalized it.
Somewhere about 2003 people took attention on these gullies. To many then it became clear that water still FLOWS in Mars. Its origin is clearly linked to certain horizons where pockets or small underground lakes can survive. While it is not clear how they survive there, two things are pretty well known:
1. Regionally these pockets are frequently linked to a few horizons so they come mostly from one and the same levels above local ground.
2. Most of them have a clear feature of bursting, nearly "exploding". The way they formed also suggested that liquid water didn't stay for long. They form and dry up fast not even reaching the bottoms of valleys or ravines.
So there is no big discovery here. What is novel is that someone may have found in laboratory HOW these bursts happen and why they have the features we see. And probably he may be missing a few things. One is why landscape remains "wet" for quite long time. Second - why the dark streaks seem to become bright-grey in time. Third - why this happens seasonally.
Anyway these questions will probably be answered in a few years from now, with fireworks and claims of novelity. This is how Science works in Mars...
We know from experiments here on Earth that if you put water into a low pressure / near vacuum environment that it will boil off. No $hit temperature isn't a factor when the environment is so remarkably light on any sort of air pressure.
This sounds like a bunch of researchers made up some convincing grant to pay their bills for a few months already answering a question we could have easily extrapolated from observable phenomena here on this planet.
And as Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Tesla's early work wouldn't have been possible without the ground broken by others. His later work, where he claimed to have invented all sorts of bizarre contraptions without a single shred of supporting evidence, however, deserves to be ignored in all science texts, as it has nothing to do with science.
Fair enough but the man obviously road that line between sanity and mental illness. He did more than enough for AC, DC, and radio (of which he was the true inventor, Marconi simply stole his patented ideas and built a simpler prototype than Tesla was working on). Essentially all modern society is built on the work of Tesla and without him, even if someone else had eventually figured out what he did, it certainly wouldn't look like it does now. The entire human race would have been set back decades if not a century. We could be in the middle of the industrial revolution just now instead of the information age pondering what we will do now that AI is growing intelligent enough to put us all out of work.
The salts in question are perchlorates, not NaCl, so they may not have the white colour expected of NaCl crystals. In addition to the colour of the crystals, other contaminants like fine dust, trace iron salts (of which there might be a great deal if not the actual perchlorate salt) and other chemicals might serve to discolour the new crystals even further.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
I have not brought myself to the point of watching the new Cosmos - and I watch almost nothing but documentaries as a preference. I just don't want the series spoiled and I'm not a huge fan of Tyson. I think I'd have been more quick to watch it if it had had a different presenter - perhaps Cox or even Greene. Susskind or the black guy with the crazy hair (I always forget his name) might have been good choices. Tyson's always grated on me. Well, not always but since about the time when he was starting to get big on Nova.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It's an improvement. For the longest time, they were running about claiming that the FBI had made up the term and were quoting a Wikipedia article about it. The article (and the cited sources) did not say any such thing. They said what the AC is now saying - that the FBI popularized the term and that it was for that specific reason.
That, I can attest to. That is factual and confirmed in many sources - there's even a few (non-crazy) documentaries about it. The FBI did, indeed, popularize the expression. They weren't the first to use it or anything. See? Always a little truth to those sorts of things. I had the debate with, what I presume was, the same person a couple of times before they stopped repeating it. It was ruining their credibility! :D
As for the rest of what they say... Well, that's up to you to decide what to believe. I'm pretty damned certain we've got rovers on Mars and we went to the Moon - when we said we went. I saw the broadcast live. Special effects were better than that. Sheesh. It wasn't the Stone Age or anything. Kubrick could have done better. I've read a few things about the folks who tend to believe in conspiracy theories. Life's too short for all that.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I don't think anyone doubts the existence of conspiracies. I think we doubt the existence of long-lasting, nefarious, complex conspiracies. There are people conspiring all the time and doing so for varied motivations. Snowden's leak confirms that someone will always tell someone else and will do so for any number of reasons. Secrets aren't kept for long.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Cosmos is meant for popular audience, not for people who are nerdy enough to dig through science and history. I would watch it only to see if it has any cool animation of something that I already know. Carl Sagan's Cosmos... I was young and had not read that much, so it brought me so much new information. By the time Neil came along, I had read through Daniel Boorstein's series on history of science twice. At this point spending eight full hours watching the idiot box is simply out of the question.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Humanity has yet to master the atom. Not really. We can blow shit up, but we can't rearrange atoms. Not easily, not precisely and not without massive amounts of input energy.
There are many scientists, research labs, companies and other entities that have been tackling this problem for decades. Some are looking at nanotechnology, others chemical 3d-printers ... but one day (if we don't go extinct), we'll hopefully figure out how to easily construct new material from existing matter with a reasonable amount of energy.
Once we have a stable version of tech like that, imagine what we could do on Mars. This is the basic necessity technology to being able to send humanity to Mars. Water is essential in that, as well as understanding how water systems work on Mars.
Either we make it to Mars (and eventually the rest of the solar system), or we go extinct. Looking past 10,000 years ... 50,000 years...a million years: those are the only two options for humanity. Mars research is some of the most important research for our civilization and humanity as a whole.
The other small detail about Mars everyone overlooks with visions of living in domes and running around on the surface growing vege gardens is that anyone who travels there will need to live about 6 feet / 2m below the surface to avoid the radiation from the solar wind and space that our thick Earth atmosphere and magnetic field shield us from. Also the soil is toxic, but don't let that stop you!
Which you wouldn't know without the basic research being done like this.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Does it? I have seen only one case of violence that was perpetrated by a Trump supporter, and that was after the precious snowflake spit on the 70+ year old man. Do you have citations for any violence that was started by the Trump camp at a Trump rally?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Or a Hillary supporter, or a Cruz supporter, or a Bernie supporter. Any of them works.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?