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Large Caves Found on the Surface of Mars

Posted by Zonk on Tue Apr 03, 2007 11:35 AM
from the oh-crap-i'd-better-move-my-stuff dept.
NASA Space Science
David DelMonte writes "Space.com is reporting on the discovery of seven dark spots near the Equator on Mars. The thinking is that these are cave openings. The openings are the size of football fields, and one of them is thought to extend approximately 400 feet below the surface.'The researchers hope the discovery will lead to more focused spelunking on Mars. "Caves on Mars could become habitats for future explorers or could be the only structures that preserve evidence of past or present microbial life ," said Glenn Cushing of Northern Arizona University, who first spotted the black areas in the photographs.'"
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  • Wait, what? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by susano_otter (123650) on Tuesday April 03 2007, @11:41AM (#18589635) Homepage
    Why does the article keep switching back and forth between "we think they might be caves" and "we're certain they really are caves"? Let me know when they've made up their minds about whether or not they've made up their minds, and I'll start caring about these (possible) caves.

  • Surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Enderandrew (866215) <enderandrewNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday April 03 2007, @11:41AM (#18589639) Homepage Journal
    We know Venus has mountains and valleys. We know Mars has mountains and valleys.

    Should be at all surprised to find caves on Mars?

    I thought we already believed that all solid planets had plate activity like Earth, that formed the mountains and valleys. Aren't caves a natural extension of that thought process?

    I thought this was a given.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I don't see the word "surprising" anywhere in the article. You do realize there's a difference between predicting something and confirming it, right?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Cedric Tsui (890887)
      Mars does not have plate activity like earth.

      This is why Mars has larger mountains and deeper valleys than earth, because the one plate does not move, and that mountain on the top of the hotspot never moved away from the source of its growth.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Normal Dan (1053064)
      We have hypothesised about caves on other planets but have not seen any until this point. The fantastic thing is not that there are caves on Mars, but the fact that we may have found them. This new find could drastically change our future missions to Mars.

    • Re:Surprise? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by thelexx (237096) on Tuesday April 03 2007, @11:57AM (#18589925)
      Speculation, no matter how informed and certain, is never as good as proof.

    • Re:Surprise? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Red Flayer (890720) on Tuesday April 03 2007, @12:22PM (#18590325) Journal

      I thought we already believed that all solid planets had plate activity like Earth, that formed the mountains and valleys. Aren't caves a natural extension of that thought process?
      Not necessarily. Most caves on earth are not caused by pyroclastic flow, but rather by (acidic) flowing water dissolving calcite in limestone.
    • Actually Mars and Venus don't have any major plate activity [lukew.com] and haven't for Millions of years(see wikipedia). It's also why they have weak magnetic fields as the internal dynamo is what sustains a magnetic field. Internal dynamo drives plate tectonics which are sustained [about.com] by the cooling action of surface and core exchanges.
      Mars is dead geologically, meaning that it has no volcanic activity and we think that the core has (probably) hardened [anl.gov].
      Incidentally, Venus is a much better candidate for colonization, but

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by mykdavies (1369)
      "I thought we already believed that all solid planets had plate activity like Earth"

      Quite the opposite actually: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#Plate _tectonics_on_other_planets [wikipedia.org] ...it has been proposed that the mechanisms of plate tectonics may *once*[4BY ago] have been active on [Mars]...

      Venus shows no evidence of active plate tectonics. There is debatable evidence of active tectonics in the planet's distant past.

      Some of the satellites of Jupiter have features that may be related to plate-tec

  • Ack Ack Ack! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 03 2007, @11:43AM (#18589687)
    We come in peace!

    Ack Ack Ack! Ack Ack ACKACK!

    Do not run! We are your friends!
  • The same kind of thing as the "face". I think they're jumping way ahead by calling these cave entrances.

  • "Qua-a-a-a-id...." (Score:3, Funny)

    by ciaohound (118419) on Tuesday April 03 2007, @11:44AM (#18589705)
    "Start the generator, Quaid."

  • They're not caves... (Score:4, Funny)

    by brennanw (5761) * on Tuesday April 03 2007, @11:47AM (#18589753) Homepage
    ... they're where the Martians store all their canal-boats till next thaw.
  • > Caves on Mars could become habitats for future explorers...

    Does anyone else find it slightly amusing that as humans move out into space we may yet again end up living in caves?
    • "or could be the only structures that preserve evidence of past or present microbial life

      And the best way to find out if they are there and like to eat people is to have some move in.

    • Re:No matter how much changes... (Score:4, Informative)

      by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) (613870) on Tuesday April 03 2007, @12:25PM (#18590373) Journal
      > Does anyone else find it slightly amusing that as humans move out into space we may yet again end up living in caves?

      It's no more interesting than the fact that people on Mars will probably wear shoes, just like upper paleolithic humans. In fact, less interesting because caves have never played a significant role in human habitation. Humans have lived all over the world, but how many of those places do you think have caves?

  • caves a good spot to land (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wizardforce (1005805) on Tuesday April 03 2007, @11:50AM (#18589811) Journal
    Mars has no global magnetic field to deflect solar radiation which means that when humans go there they will be exposed to alot of deadly radiation- if we want to stay on mars we need a place that is safe- caves are one such place. they shield agaisnt radiation and make it easier to build habitats. this discovery could allow humans to colonize mars.
    • caves a good spot to land

      We have enough problem landing on flat ground on Mars...now you want to land in a cave? Good luck with that!

      • We live in a mobile home. It's like a cave, with wheels. You can go places. Except we never went anywhere.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by dan828 (753380)
        Well it's not like we're going to ship a backhoe to mars any time soon, so finding some pre-existing holes in the ground to use just might make establishment of a base just a tad bit more convenient.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by confused one (671304)
          If we do try to establish a permanent presence, like a "base" on Mars, we will need to do exactly this kind of thing: "ship a backhoe to Mars." Not a backhoe in the traditional sense; but, this kind of equipment will be required to set up the infrastructure and build the first permanent habitations. Not to mention the need for heavy equipment for acquiring raw materials, to begin development of locally available resources. In the first years, you will be far, far from self sustaining and just about ever
  • They would also offer a modest amount of protection to future human explorers. The thin atmosphere of Mars offers no protection against solar radiation, so lots of solid rock would be our best bet (though it will be pretty cold in there).

  • Black Areas (Score:5, Funny)

    by AeroIllini (726211) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .inilliorea.> on Tuesday April 03 2007, @11:51AM (#18589827)

    ...said Glenn Cushing of Northern Arizona University, who first spotted the black areas in the photographs.
    "Uh oh, looks like someone smudged the photo."

    *rubs finger on photo*

    "Hmm. Guess they're caves, then."
  • People have known about, and even explored, these caverns of Mars [webshots.com] for over two decades.
  • Part of the symbolism of the space baby at the end of the movie is that people are masters of the Earth, but we're infants in space. We're vulnerable, and have to learn and practice even simple things like moving from one end of the spacecraft to the other in a spacesuit. We wear diapers up there.

    If we're going to be on Mars, it is therefore fitting that we should be cavemen. That's where we started, and that's where we will start again.

    • Re:2001 A space odyssey (Score:5, Funny)

      by VWJedi (972839) on Tuesday April 03 2007, @12:11PM (#18590123)
      It's hard to believe that such an insightful statement could come from a "Profane MuthaFucka".

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by owlnation (858981)

      If we're going to be on Mars, it is therefore fitting that we should be cavemen. That's where we started, and that's where we will start again.
      Agreed. But with one teensy caveat. We shouldn't make the same mistakes again.

  • WHAT? (Score:5, Funny)

    by corifornia (995298) on Tuesday April 03 2007, @12:03PM (#18590029) Homepage
    Holes? In the ground?
  • Princess Leia: The cave is collapsing!
    Han Solo: This is no cave...
    Princess Leia: What?!

    Mind you, things could be a lot worse. It's not like NASA has told us that contrary to all expectations, the thing orbiting the Earth is not a moon, it's a space station...
  • ...that we haven't yet planned on sending any kind of excavation equipment to do archaeological digs on Mars. I suspect that if we do, we'll be very surprised to find evidence of previous intelligent life and whole civilizations that existed quadrillions of years ago. At the least we could do an entire deep sonar survey of the planet to find potential digging sites. I should run NASA. I always come up with the good ideas.
    • > I suspect that if we do, we'll be very surprised... If you suspect that you're going to be surprised, then it can't be a surprise after all. This is a consequence of a theorem from probability theory: your expectation of what you think your future expectation of something should be must match your current expectation of it.
  • There are solutional caves - caves formed by water - and there are lava-tube caves - caves (lava tubes, actually) formed by molten rock. When molten lava cools around other hotter lava, the hotter lava travels around the cooler, more solid, lava and sometimes drains out enough to create a pocket of, well, emptiness. Often times, lava tubes are not discovered until the ground gives way and opens into a pit to access the tube. Hawaii has lots of Lava tubes as do many areas near volcanoes.

    On Earth, the ground breaks up due to water-action and other biological means (animals, bacteria, humans, etc...). I'm sure on Mars there's another method to break open a lava tube...sandblasting due to a large storm on Mars' surface and the occasional meteorite.

    It's no surprise that Mars has caves - it makes sense. Whether or not those caves are solutional is what is important here.

  • If we missed this... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rifter (147452) on Tuesday April 03 2007, @01:20PM (#18591303) Homepage

    Humans have been scrutinizing Mars to the best of their ability given available technology for centuries. We have sent probes to map the surface multiple times and robots to probe in various ways. And all this time we missed seven caves whose openings were larger than football fields (and in some cases larger than two football fields) which just happen to be near one of the most prominent features we know about. Whether these features are caves or not, the facts of their size and location should be a wakeup call to us as far as the limitations of our efforts thus far. Who knows what else we are missing; one must also wonder at the difficulty of finding microbes on a planet where we were unable to detect features of this size.

    I hope one day we can place colonies on Mars, as inhospitable as it is. Once we have done that we will be in a better position to explore the planet as we have ours. Every time we think we have found everything worth finding on Mars and further exploration will not yield any results that change our impression that it is a dull, lifeless planet whose only saving grace is that it is nearby we find something that surprises us. We can only hope this trend continues.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by beckerist (985855)
      The point of the story is more about the fact this discovery might lead to much easier access to sub-martian exploration. Caves are a natural occurance everywhere, that's not debated. The fact we found some on Mars that have the potential to open up new discoveries for us mere "humans" is why this story is relevant.

        • "Don't feed the bears!" Same thing goes for ACs. Don't reply to their crappy posts and they'll eventually be less of an issue.

          The first sign says "Do not feed the trolls, lest they multiply."

          The second sign says "Do not feed those who feed the trolls, comment moderation works."

          The third sign consists of seven angels with seven golden bowls filled with the wrath of God, but Revelations 15 has nothing to do with this.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Oblig Futurama quote
      Brannigan: "The great stone face of mars, the only enterance to the martian underground"
      Bender: "What about the great stone ass of mars"
      Brannigan: "Yea, but thats all the way on the other side of the planet"
    • Don't confuse a propaganda campaign by NASA with what scientists actually think. Nobody working in the field is the least surprised by caves on Mars. But NASA need to make press releases and hype them up a bit. And anyway, caves on Mars are cool.
      • we thought that Earth was the center of the universe, that the sun revolved around Earth

        I really wish people would stop telling these lies. The Earth *is* the center of the universe, and the sun *does* revolve around the Earth. If you're talking about other planets or galaxies it's not necessary a handy reference point, but there's no technical reason that you can't define Earth as the origin in any coordinate system. Similarly it's just as accurate to say that the sun revolves around Earth as it is to say that Earth revolves around the sun; the sun and Earth revolve around each other, and anything more specific only expresses a frame a reference, not a technical truth.

        The only part people ever got wrong was the the movement of other planets; there were models that showed other planets in revolution around Earth, and those were inaccurate (and quickly discovered to be so as soon as the technology existed to measure the inaccuracies in the predicted orbits of the planets). But in a time before access to high-quality optics it's not entirely unreasonable to suppose that distant non-star objects you observe behave in the same way as the sun and the moon -- that they also revolve around the Earth.

        I won't argue the "earth was flat" point (much) for the moment, as there were at least some people at some point in history who believed that. Not many people who actually studied the subject, at least not since some year that ended with "BC", but there were some people in the Early Middle Ages who argued for a flat-earth model, and their belief was wrong, so it's a better point than the first two, even if it's based on a misunderstanding of history.

        And while religion does may bad (fight about stupid things) and good things (organize society in the absence of stable political powers), they can't be blamed for your misunderstanding of astronomy or history, so maybe you should lay off.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by beckerist (985855)
          I think the scale of it all is lost on us. We're very very limited in our perceptions of reality, as we are confined to our 5 senses, and making appropriations and rough abstractions so that we can understand this reality as it relates to us. Just because we haven't seen evidence of extra-terrestrials, is not proof that they aren't there. Also, just because something is mathematically possible is a very far stretch from being a mathematical improbability (which this most certainly isn't.) You make valid poi

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by It'sYerMam (762418)

          it was postulated that if the universe was truly infinite then an exact replica of you existed

          Faulty logic - the set of square numbers is infinitely large, but does not contain 3. An infinite number of universes does not imply that every singe eventuality is contained in them.

          10^100 light years away, because that's how much volume of space would be required to store all possible combinations/arrangements of matter that exist in the known/visible universe - at about 10^100 light years you'd have a duplica

    • the hobby or practice of exploring caves

      +1 for obscurity
      In what universe, exactly, is the definition of common words considered "obscure" please?

    • Re:spelunking (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mad.frog (525085) <steven @ c r i n k l i n k .com> on Tuesday April 03 2007, @02:26PM (#18592479)
      Actually, "spelunking" isn't really used in that way (at least in the USA) by people who regularly explore caves; "caving" is the preferred term.

      For reasons that aren't completely clear, "spelunker" has come to mean "person who goes in caves without proper equipment or training" among American cavers. (At caving conventions, you'll see bumper stickers that read "Cavers Rescue Spelunkers".)

      See Wikipedia for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caving [wikipedia.org]

      For more info in general (at least on USA caving), check out the website of the National Speleological Society: http://www.caves.org/ [caves.org]

      or the chat forum, http://www.cavechat.org/ [cavechat.org]

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