Ancient Flood Channels Cut Deep Into Mars 46
astroengine writes "Relatively recently, water blasted out from an underground aquifer on Mars, carving out deep flood channels in the surface that were later buried by lava flows, radar images complied from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe shows. The channels are at least twice as deep as previous estimates for Marte Vallis, an expanse of plains just north of the Martian equator that is the youngest volcanic region on the planet. "We see similar channels elsewhere on Mars and they are not filled with lava so it's important to be able to compare different channel systems, and also similar systems on Earth, to give us clues about how they formed," lead researcher Gareth Morgan, with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, told Discovery News."
A slap (Score:2)
to the first person who likens these to the erroneous "canals".
Re:A slap (Score:5, Funny)
You know, I reckon these might be canals, that Maritans used to get water from the shrinking icecaps at the poles to the drying cities in the more temperate zones. What do you think?
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And that lava was probably from their rocket-ships taking off when they left the planet to colonize earth. I'm pretty sure I saw the ruins of Atlantis in one of those pics...
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I would kill to have some mod points to mod up this fellow AC who have read past the first book of Dune.
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You know, I reckon these might be canals, that Maritans used to get water from the shrinking icecaps at the poles to the drying cities in the more temperate zones. What do you think?
I think every Martian will agree that weaponizing lava was a really bad idea.
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Paf!
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They aren't talking relative to human history. They are talking about the geological history of Mars, which has several distinct periods that cover billions of years. And for that 500 million years is fairly recent.
If you don't like this phrasing, I strongly recommend you don't talk with geologists, planetary scientists, or astronomers. All of them would consider something that happened within the last 500 million years to be fairly recent.
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If you don't like this phrasing, I strongly recommend you don't talk with geologists, planetary scientists, or astronomers. All of them would consider something that happened within the last 500 million years to be fairly recent.
I wouldn't consider that to be "pretty recent", but that might be because I'm influenced by the geological history of Earth. We know quite a lot about it; it's been quite rich since then due to all that tectonic stuff, and the further you go back in time, the fewer traces of progressively more ancient history you find. That creates an information imbalance of sorts and although I do realize that numerically, 500 Ma is the last ten percent of the time line, it's still the most interesting part for us. I gues
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The words "ancient" and "recent" are basically antonyms.
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Am I missing something, how can you say 500 million years and then call this relatively recent?
Go talk to a geologist.
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Rain, rivers... (Score:2)
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Dinner! (Score:1)
Did anyone else read "Ancient Food Channels"?
Gold! (Score:1, Funny)
Bored with Mars (Score:4, Interesting)
Am I the only person bored with the obsessive focusing on Mars by people desperate to find life? Maybe mars had life in the past but now its a dead dustball. There is more change of life in the ice moons of the outer solar system as they have oceans NOW. A few more missions to them and a few less to mars might be a better use of scientific resources.
Re:Bored with Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
mars is nice dirt, you can dig in it etc, the icemoons are.. ice, so it's much harder to dig and there's nothing much to see on the surface, so they might just think it's too hard for now, even if you find a hole in the ice that just means you lost your robot :).
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The could still do radar mapping and on europa there seems to be some sort of ice tectonics happening which means any life may well be frozen into ice on or not far from the surface.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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There's more to it than life. There was and still is water buried in the subsurface of Mars. If we ever want to visit another planet or Moon, Mars is going to be a lot more hospitable than, say, Europa, which exists in a deep gravity well (Jupiter), is surrounded by an intense radiation belt, takes a lot more energy to get to (or out of), and has effectively no atmosphere.
If there's no life on Mars, good. Then we can establish whatever life we want there.
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I suspect the reasons for this are:
1. Mars is the most Earth-like planet (other than Earth) we've encountered.
2. We don't really know how to land on Europa, Titan, etc. Mars, on the other hand, is a place we've been able to land on since the 1970's, and we now know how to land really sophisticated mobile probes to get really detailed looks at everything that seems interesting.
3. Mars is a likely target for eventual human colonization. It would help to understand the place as much as possible before we make
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I don't think their water is like our water, but did anybody else think that the pictures might look like lava fissures rather than channels?
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Am I the only person bored with the obsessive focusing on Mars by people desperate to find life? Maybe mars had life in the past but now its a dead dustball. There is more change of life in the ice moons of the outer solar system as they have oceans NOW. A few more missions to them and a few less to mars might be a better use of scientific resources.
I'm not bored with it. This is what science is. You have to do a lot of boring work before you might, and just might, hit the big pay day.
Was there life on mars? We are trying to find out, have some patience.
Food Channels! (Score:1)
I knew there were ancient civilizations on Mars, I knew it! And Food Channels would line up nicely with the end of civilization. What? Oh, never mind.
Mars Express (Score:2, Insightful)
What saddens me is that Mars Express was sent by the ESA and is orbiting Mars as we speak carrying RADAR for just this kind of thing (MARSIS). How many times have we seen their results in the news? I expect the next time there's a good idea for a Mars mission it'll struggle for funding because non-one remembers anything good coming from Mars Express. I'm sure there's plenty of really good science going on, but we never hear about it.
We just can't get our PR act together over here.
Antonyms (Score:2)
>>Relatively recently
>>Ancient
Does not compute.
500 mya is "recent"? (Score:2)
>>Relatively recently
>>Ancient
For once, the Slashdot headline is actually more sensible.
You have to read three paragraphs of TFA to find that "relatively recently" means "500 million years ago". It's only "recent" in comparison to the other, billions of years old, water channels previously known.
any sign of frank chalmers? (Score:2)
were there rover tracks beside the outbreak?