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Evidence Of Glaciers On Mars Suggests Recent Climate Activity
Posted by
Soulskill
on Wed Apr 23, 2008 06:02 PM
from the redhouse-effect-in-action dept.
from the redhouse-effect-in-action dept.
Last year, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured high-resolution images of the Red Planet which showed many mesas, valleys, and rock debris which appeared to be (geologically speaking) recent formations. A team of scientists from Brown University analyzed the photographs and found evidence that the terrain was carved by large glaciers much more recently than they thought possible. Climate activity on Mars was thought to have quieted over 3 billion years ago, but these glaciers would have been around within the last 10-100 million years.
"The finding could have implications for the life-on-Mars argument by strengthening the case for liquid water. Ice can melt two ways: by temperature or by pressure. As currently understood, the Martian climate is dominated by sublimation, the process by which solid substances are transformed directly to vapor. But ice packs can exert such strong pressure
at the base to produce liquid water, which makes the thickness of past glaciers on its surface so intriguing."
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So that's where the Glaciers have gone... (Score:5, Funny)
It's an inconvenient truth...
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Don't make me flog you with a "faustian bargain".
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I'm so happy when I view myself with disgust.
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Where was Al Gore when Mars needed him? (Score:3, Funny)
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John McCain on the other hand, could have done something but instead accepted the claims of martian corporate lobbyists that evidence for martian climate change was inconclusive.
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I think the glaciers might still be there.. (Score:2, Interesting)
..only they're mostly covered with dust from dust storms.
Remember the patch of ice in a crater [esa.int]? It's supposedly up to 200 meters thick. On Earth, that would be a glacier. What else could it be?
next Mars probe lands on May 25, 2008 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:next Mars probe lands on May 25, 2008 (Score:4, Funny)
How much do you want to bet that within the first week it will cut a fiber-optic line and cut part of the Martian backbone?
Parent
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Re:next Mars probe lands on May 25, 2008 (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Solar forcing or new climate model required? (Score:2, Informative)
Minor correction (Score:2)
But Earth is closer and would be subject to a more intense flux in any solar forcing.
Inverse Square law, and all that.
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Here's a quick overview of Martian seasons, http://pweb.jps.net/~gangale3/bauregger/seasons.html [jps.net] note how the seasons are not equal in length due to orbital eccentrics.
Meteor (Score:2)
Rainbow Mars by Niven (Score:2)
Joking aside, an excellent book.
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Re:Trolls are too fast (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Stop babbling talking points and look at the data. (Score:3, Insightful)
We better do something quick because the temperature hasn't increased on Earth in 10 years.
You're clearly wrong. It takes a real lack of understanding of statistics to think that you can't have a cold year or two and still have an overall warming trend. This is what happens when you confuse short-term weather trends for long term climate shifts.
Please direct your attention to the record of global temperatures from 1880-2007. [earth-policy.org]
Let's take a look at 1998 & 1999. 1998 was the third warmest year on record, with an average global temperature of 14.72 C. The following year dropped 0.26 C, and it
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The data listed in your post reminded me of when I did a project on Brownian Motion in my Fractals class a few years ago. A good example is this image [wikipedia.org].
One of the interesting things of a curve like that one is that you can view it on any scale, and it will never smooth out. If you look at a window of size 1/128, you might see a clear downward trend, but if you look at a larger window over the same point of size 1/64, you might realize that was just a small blip on an overall upward trend, and on and on. In
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127 years of climate data lets us predict so much, doesn't it? I like the models better where we just decide to use roughly 1000 years of data and the models show that CO2 has virtually no impact whatsoever on global climate, and today's current trend is normal.
But those models don't support global warming, so lets just keep this a secret, shall we?
Oh, sure. You'll "keep them a secret" because that might mean opening up your bogus data to criticism (assuming it actually exists).
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If you understood equilibrium systems, you wouldn't have asked how a tiny change in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere can cause significant climate change.
Actually, not understanding this kind of system is often the same problem creationists have -- it's the "how could complex life evolve via a random process" question.
They're the same, really. (Score:3, Insightful)
Creationists and those who disbelieve man-made climate change are at opposite ends of the intelligence spectrum.
I don't see the difference.
mods? (Score:2)
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If I serve you a meal every day that weighs less than 1% of your body weight and have that meal concist of less than 1% arsenic, it shouldn't do any harm to you, right?
But seriously man, what kind of education do you have? You might think what you just posted was witty, but actually, it was empty rethoric that will never work on anyone with some basic understanding of the atmosphere works. No, I will not teach you why, go back to school.
Re:mods? (Score:4, Insightful)
It Would Still Be Irrelevant As To The Causes Of Climate Change On Earth.
We have satellites, telescopes, and sensors monitoring every last thing you could possibly imagine about the sun. Unless the sun has some sort of magical powers, if the sun is changing in some way or another, *we'd know about it*. We don't need "planetary proxies" to tell us if the sun is getting brighter or whatnot; we have the hard data *right here*.
Oh, and for the idiots who just assume that the IPCC scientists forgot to consider the sun: there are about 50 peer reviewed papers [ucar.edu] summed up in the technical report (pretty much every recent peer-reviewed paper on the subject) related to the sun, changes in the sun, historical changes in the sun, how the various forms of solar radiation interact with earth processes, and so on. Now, how many of them have *you* read that lets you feel qualified to hold a contrary view?
Parent
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Maybe he can read this to you really slowly:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_030320.html
In what could be the simplest explanation for one component of global warming, a new study shows the Sun's radiation has increased by .05 percent per decade since the late 1970s.
The increase would only be significant to Earth's climate if it has been going on for a century or more, said study leader Richard Willson, a Columbia University researcher also affiliated with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The Sun's increasing output has only been monitored with precision since satellite technology allowed necessary observations. Willson is not sure if the trend extends further back in time, but other studies suggest it does.
"This trend is important because, if sustained over many decades, it could cause significant climate change," Willson said.
Oh right... inconvenient truth.
And might I remind you, we have better records of the Mars Ice Caps, going back to Galileo, on what the caps used to look like. They are shrinking.
Without human intervention.
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posted: 02:30 pm ET 20 March 2003
Nice cherry picking, we are in the middle of the minimum right now.
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Well, that is the issue. It is possible for other properties to NOT be known to us that are causing this. But in the end, the real issue is that temps are climbing and we DO have the ability to change it via controlling our output. I mean, if somebody is shooting at you, do you really have to know whether it is an old style ball or a dum-dum before you decide to get out of the way? I always
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Or maybe an asteroid hit mars, the resulting dust cloud blocked the sun and caused global cooling to the extent that glaciers were able to form (from what I don't know).
Using a trend that may have happened over a million years to invalidate theories about the cause of a trend occur
Mars does have manmade stuff (Score:2)
But your main point is valid. Solar radiation is only one of the earth's heat sources. Internal radioactive decay contributes a lot, so does gravitational/tidal friction and the magnetic dynamo effects on the iron core.
Oh, obviously. (Score:2)
Clearly, the same forces that eliminated glaciers 10-100 million years ago are behind the changes of the past 150 years.
Re:global warming (Score:4, Funny)
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I keep hearing this repeated yet all studies that I have read show that the amount of solar activity in recent times has very little affect on the Earths climate.
For Mars and to a lesser degree Earth one of the main driving forces for long term climate change is variations in their orbits around the Sun.
The orbit of Mars is very eccentric, with the orbit currently varying from 1.38 AU to 1.67 AU over a Martian year. Over geological t
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http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html [tmgnow.com]
you might not the conclusion: "70-90 years oscillations in global mean temperature are correlated with corresponding oscillations in solar activity. Whereas the solar influence is obvious in the data from the last four centuries, signatures of human activity are not yet distinguishable in the observations. "
Do you quote Time Cube, too? (Score:2)
"What Big Bang?"
"The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."
"Comet Caused Tsunami!"
"War in Heaven, War on Earth."
"Is Cassini a Kamikaze Deep Space Probe?"
Yeah, like I would EVER trust ANYTHING published on that site.
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"The cleansing will come from above, not from another country on the Earth as biblical scholars have believed; There is a political organization in the Heavens above us; There is evidence of contention that has gone on for sometime now. War is at hand. And it will likely come in our lifetime. Greater war than this earth has ever known."
right. to GP, check your sauce pls.
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Re:Did you see the pictures? (Score:4, Informative)
Umm... No. The current presence of liquid water has not been confirmed. The best evidence that we've found so far is actually not inconsistent with a dry flow down a steep hill. The flows could still be water, and that can't be ruled out. However, it has not been confirmed.
The fact is, all of us really want there to be liquid water on Mars, it will be a major break through if and when it happens. However, no matter how tantalizing the images are, they still don't confirm the presence of water....yet.
Parent
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