Mars - Water

[bdw000]

Gee, it must be "definitive" because they drew a picture of a lake on their picture.

How long before all schoolchildren are brainwashed into believing that "cartoons equal proof" ?

How long before the creators of Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and Roadrunner are considered to be the greatest scientists of all time????

[mharratsc]

I like how the lake supposedly created a delta, yet somehow vanished so fast that it didn't leave any indications of secondary shorelines... poof! in a flash, like lightning!

[moses]

It seems that Mars may have had water, a thicker atmosphere and even life, but that most of them were destroyed in electrical exchanges 4500 years or so ago. So it'd be unlikely that much, if any, evidence will be found on the surface of Mars, since a deep layer of the northern hemisphere was apparently EDMed and deposited in the southern hemisphere, as suggested at http://thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch ... osnote.htm .
Lloyd
There are rocks on Mars that have good remnant magnetism.
Perhaps these rocks did not come from Mars but were
transported there. They might contain water. If there
were deposits in the southern hemisphere then these
might contain evidence of conditions on ancient Mars.
Thus if water was once on Mars then these deposits
might contain water.
Mo

[Joe Keenan]

Is it me, or, do I see a Leprechaun by the shore of the lake?

[junglelord]

This is the news of the day at NASA Space Weather.

ICY SURPRISE ON MARS: In 1976, NASA's Viking 2 lander dug into the soil of Mars in search of water and came up dry. NASA has just learned that Viking 2 might have succeeded if it had dug only 4 inches deeper. Meteorites hitting the Red Planet in 2008 and 2009 have exposed subsurface deposits of ice in the general area where Viking 2 landed. According to pictures taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the ice is surprisingly close to the surface in easy reach of robotic landers or thirsty human explorers. Get the full story from Science@NASA.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009 ... ianice.htm

[rangerover777]

Thanks Junglelord,

Very interesting article.

[mharratsc]

To start off with- they don't make any mention that they physically witnessed meteors making these craters...

So, if it's possible that these craters (as is surmised with many other ones on Mars) were perhaps created electrically, would it be possible that the water ice is not being 'exposed' from under the soil, but is perhaps being created by the electrical activity? Like the water (or hydroxyls) that are created on comets?

Mike H.

[GaryN]

Maybe I'm seeing what I want to see, but this 'crater' seems to exhibit a hexagonal shape, with bays, and possible dendritic features in the ice at the right. Also, if this was an impact, wouldn't much of the red dust have been kicked up with the ice, making it much darker than it appears?



Not saying NASA would try to mislead us, but I'm with mike h and his electrical production here.

[mharratsc]

I never even thought to look that closely at it, but- yeah, you're right! If that was a big splash, where's the material that was on top of the ice??

There is no way that ice could be that pristine and white if that was a big splash from a rock thumping down at high velocity!

Mike H.

[bboyer]

In fact, it's a field tending towards 5 and 6 sided figures, honeycomb-like. If you click on the 3rd image below it becomes much more apparent. The screen shots are excerpted from the zoom-in sequence of the NASA video clip cited below. Reminiscent of a cymatics-driven landscape to me (which need not exclude EU effects as well) .

Screenshots from the short video clip here:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/o ... 924-th.jpg

[mharratsc]

Has anyone been able to correlate if this zone occurs in one of those magnetic anomaly areas on Mars?

Here we have a field of hexagonal craters, and a new "meteor" crater that is generally the same size and shape as all the other 'craters' in this field. Could this be a 'grid' of sorts that is diffusing an electrical charge across a large area of almost equal conductivity, much like an anode plate? Imagine that each of those hexagonal divots was instead an anode tuft...

Perhaps the reason why some of these craters maintain a hexagonal shape is because the current pair contacting the ground at that point is very short-lived? As in the case of this enormous field of them- perhaps the currents are brief in duration but high in frequency, rather than some of the larger craters and rilles, in which the current pair stay in contact with the surface for a longer period in time. This would allow the pair to 'spin the hexagon' and create a full circle, or even wander along creating a sinuous rille?

Perhaps the composition of the soil there, along with the short duration of the electrical discharge, is only allowing for the creation of the suspected water-ice... unlike some of the more energetic discharges seen elsewhere in other soil types that do everything from glassify the surface to creating the 'blueberry' geodes?

Just thinking out loud here...

Mike H.

[Osmosis]

Perhaps it's dry ice? NASA also claims that the Martian "spiders" are dry ice blowing radial furrows in the soil, at the south pole. Funny, how possible electrical activity also occurs at the south poles of many planets!

[MattEU]

99 percent pure water ice found on Mars

Surprisingly, the white ice may be made from 99 percent pure water.

"We knew there was ice below the surface at high latitudes of Mars, but we find that it extends far closer to the equator than you would think, based on Mars' climate today," said Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona, a member of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE camera.

"The other surprising discovery is that ice exposed at the bottom of these meteorite impact craters is so pure," Byrne said. "The thinking before was that ice accumulates below the surface between soil grains, so there would be a 50-50 mix of dirt and ice. We were able to figure out, given how long it took that ice to fade from view, that the mixture is about one percent dirt and 99 percent ice."

...How far water ice extends toward the equator depends largely on how much water has been available in the Martian atmosphere in the recent past, Byrne said: "The ice is a relic of a more humid climate not very long ago, perhaps just several thousand years ago."

While Phoenix's discovery of sub-surface ice was not totally unexpected, finding highly pure ice far closer to the equator because of random meteor impacts was unexpected, he said.

There are several theories about how a layer of such pure ice could have formed beneath Mars surface. Byrne said he thinks that one of the most promising ideas is that this ice on Mars formed in the same way that pure ice lenses form beneath the surface of the Earth.

"That's where you have very thin films of liquid water around ice grains and soil grains and they migrate around to form clear ice lenses on top of the ice table, even at temperatures well below zero. This process is called 'frost heave' on Earth, and it's considered a nuisance in most places because it cracks up roads and tilts walls and destroys foundations of houses.

"But on Mars it would be of great interest if we could discover a process that involved liquid water in today's climate, and not just in some of the warmest areas of the planet but in some of the coldest areas of the planet in the high latitude regions," Byrne said.

New Images Reveal "Pure" Water Ice at Low Latitudes on Mars

Worth a repeat

"The other surprising discovery is that ice exposed at the bottom of these meteorite impact craters is so pure," Byrne said. "The thinking before was that ice accumulates below the surface between soil grains, so there would be a 50-50 mix of dirt and ice. We were able to figure out, given how long it took that ice to fade from view, that the mixture is about one percent dirt and 99 percent ice."

Unless the water was created when the crater was EDM'd?

[GaryN]

Unless the water was created when the crater was EDM'd?

100% with you there MattEU. Surely this is something we could try to reproduce in experiments? Maybe dahlenaz has all the required electric 'fixins'?

[bdw000]

Some of the professionals here may wish to comment on this (if you already haven't in the past):

http://io9.com/5546918/an-ancient-force ... ms-of-mars

The original is from Nature (and requires money to read).