Erosion on Mars
The question is, when was Mars last a water planet? The mainstream uniformitarian interpretation is that all these rivers flowed a billion or more years ago. The point is that it is difficult to accept that Mars moved into its present orbit within human memory, so it is much more palatable to remove the events in time and safely deposit them in the distant past.
But is that assumption justified?
One of the techniques for estimating the age of a planetary/or moon's surface is crater counting. Needless to say this is a pure uniformitarian technique that is based on the assumption that impact craters are formed at a regular rate and by counting them, one can get a ball park estimate of the age of the surface. This is totally irrelevant to catastrophism. A billion years of craters (according to the count) could have been formed in days under catastrophic conditions. It has been pointed out by mainstream critics that crater counts can be off by an order of magnitude or more. Any ages derived from using the 'crater count' method are pretty much worthless.
It is interesting to understand what Mars SHOULD look like if it were in its present orbit for billions of years. Before the realities of the space probes were to sink in, Mars was expected to be a desert with no sharp features, gently rolling hills, worn down craters. Carl Sagan explained this:
Sagan wrote:when men arrive [on Mars]...they will wander over a gently sloping landscape and enormous number of flat eroded flat bottomed craters.
Carl Sagan,
"Mars, A New World To Explore", National Geographic, (Dec. 1967), p.828
Patrick Moore, later wrote about how wrong the expert scientific expectations were:
Patrick Moore wrote:The Martian scene proved to be utterly unlike what most people expected. Instead of gentle rolling plains, there were mountains, valleys, craters and volcanoes."
But Moore would be in for an even greater surprise because nobody expected to find that Mars would show features that it was formerly a water planet (somewhat) like Earth!
Mars is often engulfed in planet wide dust storms featuring enormous mountain sized dust devils. The biggest of these storms can be seen with telescopes on Earth. It is not uncommon for all of Mars to be obscured by the largest of these storms. What must be the erosive effect of billions of years of these monster dust storms?
The point is that if Mars has been in its present orbit around the present Sun it should have looked like Sagan expected. After a billion or more years of untold dust storms, all of the riverbed features, shorelines, etc. should have eroded away, leaving Mars like a planet wide cold desert of dust plains and rolling dunes.
Researchers at NASA Ames conducted wind tunnel experiments with a simulated Martian atmosphere (barometric pressure, wind speeds, chemical/mineralogical make up of surface materials) as per data gathered by the Viking Lander.
https://www.nasa.gov/thermophysics-faci ... aboratory/
The conclusion was:
The results yield extremely high rates of abrasion. Even using very conservative values for the various cases that can be considered, the surface of Mars ought to be reduced to a smooth plain.
Farouk El-Baz, M.H.A. Hassan, eds,
Physics of Desertification, (1986) pp 182-185
The above experiment yielded about 2 centimeters (0.8 inches) of erosion per century. That is 660 feet of erosion in one million years. The results indicate that the surface of Mars is exposed to a highly erosive environment.
Clearly it is impossible for these riverbeds and most other features of the Martian surface to have survived millions or billions of years. Mars should look like Sagan mistakenly described it in pre space probe days.
Yet its features are sharp and fresh, indicative of a recent catastrophic past.
As a sidenote in
Worlds In Collision (1950), p. 364, Velikovsky described what Mars should look like from the perspective of his theory.
The contacts with Mars with other planets larger than itself and more powerful make it highly improbable that any higher forms of life, if they previously existed there, survived on Mars. It is, rather, a dead planet; every higher form of life, of whatever kind it might have been, most probably had its Last Day. Their work could not survive either, The "canals" of Mars appear to be a result of the play of geological forces that answered in rifts and cracks the outer forces acting in collisions.