Methane On Mars May Indicate Living Planet 200
Riding with Robots writes "NASA is announcing today that the definitive detection of methane in the Martian atmosphere means the planet is still alive, at least geologically, and perhaps even biologically. 'Methane is quickly destroyed in the Martian atmosphere in a variety of ways, so our discovery of substantial plumes of methane in the northern hemisphere of Mars indicates some ongoing process is releasing the gas,' said one agency scientist. The gas was detected with observations made over over several Martian years with NASA telescopes at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Both biological and geological processes could explain the methane."
Lovelock - Gaia hypothesis strong evidence against (Score:3, Interesting)
over 40 years ago Lovelock pointed out that you can tell there is life on earth because the atmosphere is HUGELY out of chemical equilibrium.
And it is maintained that way due to life on earth.
He also argued that by the same reasoning, there ain't life on Mars.
I suspect this bit of disequilibrium is not enough
to indicate life.
Mass Spec (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Martian Global Warming (Score:2, Interesting)
I think I heard somewhere that methane gas contributes to Global Warming. If Mars is going through Global Warming shouldn't it be renamed to Solar, or even Universal, Warming?
No. Global refers to the local planet in context. As for universal warming, fat chance of that. Given the universe's expansion and the laws of thermodynamics, the universe will eventually cool to somewhere around 0K (but probably not exactly at 0K, due to quantum vaccuum energy) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe [wikipedia.org]
Re:Greenhouse gas! That stuff is worse than CO2 .. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think we need a qualifier for "relatively quickly" and "that long" when talking about geologic timescales. When dealing with this sort of thing "relatively quickly" could mean anything from a few months to several million years.
Both are good (Score:5, Interesting)
Mars Rovers? (Score:4, Interesting)
Are any of the Mars Rovers near the methane plume sites?
Deep Hot Biosphere (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Greenhouse gas! That stuff is worse than CO2 .. (Score:3, Interesting)
Reading this article http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090115-mars-methane-news.html [space.com] gives the impression that they're talking months. From the article.
The methane plumes started to show up in the northern hemisphere spring of Mars, gradually building up and peaking in late summer. At one point during the study, the primary plume contained about 19,000 metric tons (21,000 tons) of methane, comparable to the amount produced at the massive hydrocarbon seep at Coal Pit Point in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Short-lived
Outside of the plumes, methane concentrations were very low, showing that the gas didn't get very far or last very long in the atmosphere. In fact, its lifetime was even shorter than expected or could be explained by the usual method of methane destruction, photolysis (reaction with sunlight).
So it sounds seasonal.