Researchers Solve One Of The Biggest Mysteries About How Water Flows On Mars (gizmodo.com) 99
An anonymous reader writes: Not only is water flowing on Mars, it's also boiling. This experiment published today in Nature Geoscience solves one of the major mysteries about the surface of the red planet. Gizmodo writes, "Researchers built a chamber simulating the conditions and atmosphere of Mars, then put ice in there to melt. The ice did melt and the water from it flowed -- but there was also a surprise. The surface of the water boiled as it flowed, and that boiling was strong enough to move not just the water but also dirt and debris surrounding the streams. Importantly, temperature was not the major factor in this boiling water, it was due to the pressure of the atmosphere." You may remember pictures of flowing water on Mars which surfaced last year. One would think the summer temperatures should be too cold for water to flow on Mars (as seen in the images), however, the water that flows on Mars is a salty-brine which lowers the freezing point of the water. So how does the water manage to carve out the landscape so quickly and visibly? Easy: the boiling water theory. Boiling water hits a boiling stage along its surface, where it kicks up dust and dirt and debris in the water's wake. The research team did see the boiling water move debris, but they also saw collapses along the sides of the flows. The boiling and disturbance it causes etches those lines on Mars clearly enough for satellites to notice them.
Re:Simple question (Score:5, Insightful)
You read the title, maybe even the summary. You then went through the trouble of writing a comment. Which means it did affect your life a little bit.
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The other small detail about Mars everyone overlooks with visions of living in domes and running around on the surface growing vege gardens is that anyone who travels there will need to live about 6 feet / 2m below the surface to avoid the radiation from the solar wind and space that our thick Earth atmosphere and magnetic field shield us from. Also the soil is toxic, but don't let that stop you!
Which you wouldn't know without the basic research being done like this.
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You, him and Elon Musk, surprisingly enough, are not the population on which the importance of discoveries is based.
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He has a legitimate point. It's news for nerds, but perhaps not stuff that matters. "Stuff that matters" is pretty subjective though. It might matter to someone.
Living on Mars? Ridiculous! (Score:1)
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it's cold as hell.
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Or, it can allow you to rationalize further trashing this planet.
What you're saying is basically, "Knowing that you'll get 27 virgins in the afterlife should give you more hope..."
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If there isn't freedom of speech then the only alternative is violence.
"There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Does it? I have seen only one case of violence that was perpetrated by a Trump supporter, and that was after the precious snowflake spit on the 70+ year old man. Do you have citations for any violence that was started by the Trump camp at a Trump rally?
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How does water flowing on Mars affect my life or anyone else's in a meaningful way?
Your life doesn't matter. Neither does anyone else's.
Only humanity matters. And its continuity strongly depends on its understanding of how other planets work.
If you die tomorrow and that makes humanity advance a thousand-millionth of a day in its search for expansion, that would be a good net result.
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Humanity matters exactly as much as any single human. i.e. not at all.
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Humanity matters exactly as much as any single human. i.e. not at all.
I disagree. I believe humanity has a tiny chance of transcending what we currently call the universe.
I feel there would be meaning in that transcendence.
The important question is . . . (Score:5, Funny)
. . . which direction does Martian water flow when you flush the toilet . . . clockwise, or counterclockwise . . . ?
How does water flowing on Mars affect my life or anyone else's in a meaningful way?
This could affect your life if you are flying to Jupiter, and stop to take a dump on Mars.
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Ooh, get you, Mr Important. It affects you about as much as your inane post affects me.
If you find it so aggravating to find your eyes assaulted with headlines about advances in planetary science, kindly piss off elsewhere, or at least STFU.
Simpler question: why the hell did you post in the first place?
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Or a Hillary supporter, or a Cruz supporter, or a Bernie supporter. Any of them works.
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Nobody had the kind of intuitive understanding of the physics first seen by Faraday that Tesla did, and their true potential no just for AC current in wires but in the air, possibly nobody has sin
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And as Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Tesla's early work wouldn't have been possible without the ground broken by others. His later work, where he claimed to have invented all sorts of bizarre contraptions without a single shred of supporting evidence, however, deserves to be ignored in all science texts, as it has nothing to do with science.
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I have not brought myself to the point of watching the new Cosmos - and I watch almost nothing but documentaries as a preference. I just don't want the series spoiled and I'm not a huge fan of Tyson. I think I'd have been more quick to watch it if it had had a different presenter - perhaps Cox or even Greene. Susskind or the black guy with the crazy hair (I always forget his name) might have been good choices. Tyson's always grated on me. Well, not always but since about the time when he was starting to get
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How does water flowing on Mars affect my life or anyone else's in a meaningful way? Can anyone give me an answer? I'm betting nobody can.
This news gives you a heads-up that once you move to Mars, you're going to have to make some serious altitude adjustments to your cake recipes.
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"How does water flowing on Mars affect my life or anyone else's in a meaningful way?"
No, water flowing on Mars does not affect the lives of AC trolls in any meaningful way.
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Humanity has yet to master the atom. Not really. We can blow shit up, but we can't rearrange atoms. Not easily, not precisely and not without massive amounts of input energy.
There are many scientists, research labs, companies and other entities that have been tackling this problem for decades. Some are looking at nanotechnology, others chemical 3d-printers ... but one day (if we don't go extinct), we'll hopefully figure out how to easily construct new material from existing matter with a reasonable amount o
Good for distillation (Score:4, Interesting)
Ugh (Score:2)
temperature was not the major factor in this boiling water, it was due to the pressure of the atmosphere
Facepalm material.
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Alright, that made me curious. Why are you face palming?
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The person that you responded to said nothing about either of those two things?
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Yes but that doesn't explain why you threaded it there. Usually there's some significance to where a comment is placed in a conversation - for a variety of reasons. ;-)
It was (and that's an achievement in itself) the oddest remark in the entire thread - odd enough so that I scrolled *back up* to ask what was going on. In short, I was confused. In long, I was wondering if you actually had a point and if I was missing something as well as curious if maybe you'd threaded it there for a reason I didn't understa
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Oh, don't apologize to me. LOL It's all good - I was just sort of baffled. I've seen you post before and I'd tell you if I thought you were an idiot. So, I was actually wondering what the hell it was that I was missing. I read it (including the gibberish you responded to) a half dozen times in my effort to figure it out. I was wondering if I was missing something in the Ebonics. However, surprising though it may be, I'm actually sort of fluent in understanding (I guess I could speak it) a number of regional
Re: goatse.cx (Score:1)
The causes of level differences on Earth are mainly plate tectonics, volcanoes and the spinoff known as the moon. Water didn't cause any of these. Actually water causes erosion that levels the terrain. It didn't cause the ocean floor to sink. You've got it completely wrong.
Its weaker, not negative. (Score:2)
If you ever come across negative gravity where things travel uphill do be sure to let us know won't you.
This is not intuitively obvious... *HOW*?!? (Score:2)
This is not intuitively obvious to people who memorized PV = nRT in grade school *HOW*?!?
Who was this exactly a mystery *from*?
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This is not intuitively obvious to people who memorized PV = nRT in grade school *HOW*?!?
Who was this exactly a mystery *from*?
Well there's the submitter, who stated temperature wasn't a major factor in the boiling. So we've got one person.
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Roger Goodell, apparently...
Re:This is not intuitively obvious... *HOW*?!? (Score:5, Informative)
This is not intuitively obvious to people who memorized PV = nRT in grade school *HOW*?!?
Who was this exactly a mystery *from*?
Because it has nothing to do with the ideal gas law.
They are talking about the saturation or vaporization curve of water which is a function of pressure and temperature. At 1 atm water boils at 212F. On Mars where the pressure is lower, it boils at a much lower temperature.
This boiling behavior is not new or unexpected. What is new is the understanding about how this vaporization process can move sediments on Mars. That's the new science.
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But actually that is not the boiling point equation, which is much more complicated because of different substance properties, but the major factors are still T and P.
I am aware of that. As is every halfway decent cook who has made pasta at higher altitudes than sea level, and added salt to raise the boiling point of the water back to 212F/100C so it cooks correctly, since unadulterated water boils at a lower temperate in Denver than it does at sea level.
And since the baseline on the boiling point equation is water, and we are talking water, and the typical adulterant we use is salt, and we are talking about a brine...
This is pretty stupidly obvious to anyone who has ev
Then wheres the mineral deposits? (Score:1)
If salty brine is part of the boiling water effect on Mars, then after the water disappears, there should be white streaks in the satellite pictures that show where the salt was deposited. The sat sensors should be able to pick up this mineral to confirm that the boiling water consists of a salty brine. I didn't see any white streaks to indicate the path of the water in the picture with the residual being the salt.
Not NaCl (Score:3)
The salts in question are perchlorates, not NaCl, so they may not have the white colour expected of NaCl crystals. In addition to the colour of the crystals, other contaminants like fine dust, trace iron salts (of which there might be a great deal if not the actual perchlorate salt) and other chemicals might serve to discolour the new crystals even further.
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Unless, of course, you were serious about your post. In that case, I pity you.
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Keep taking the meds fella. I'm sure you next appointment with the doc is not far away.
Course, in the meantime you might want to figure out how NASA are bouncing signals off mars too fool all those non governmental orgs and other countries who are picking up the signals too. Oh, wait! They must be in on it too! I bet its the Bilderberg Group eh??
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I don't trust many governments. But I do trust in basic physics and the impossibility of virtually every country in the world with a science program being in on some conspiracy to fake a robotic mars mission that most of the public frankly don't give a shit about anyway. It would be harder to fake than actually go there.
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Anyone who doubts the possibility of a conspiracy in the US after the Snowden leaks is off their rocker not even so much because of what was leaked (although that was plenty bad) but because of the resp
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I don't think anyone doubts the existence of conspiracies. I think we doubt the existence of long-lasting, nefarious, complex conspiracies. There are people conspiring all the time and doing so for varied motivations. Snowden's leak confirms that someone will always tell someone else and will do so for any number of reasons. Secrets aren't kept for long.
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It's an improvement. For the longest time, they were running about claiming that the FBI had made up the term and were quoting a Wikipedia article about it. The article (and the cited sources) did not say any such thing. They said what the AC is now saying - that the FBI popularized the term and that it was for that specific reason.
That, I can attest to. That is factual and confirmed in many sources - there's even a few (non-crazy) documentaries about it. The FBI did, indeed, popularize the expression. They
Picture?? (Score:2)
What a old story (Score:2)
Somewhere about 2003 people took attention on these gullies. To many then it became clear that water still FLOWS in Mars. Its origin is clearly linked to certain horizons where pockets or small underground lakes can survive. While it is not clear how they survive there, two things are pretty well known:
1. Regionally these pockets are frequently linked to a few horizons so they come mostly from one and the same levels above local ground.
2. Most of them have a clear feature of bursting, nearly "exploding". Th
How was this water problem a mystery? (Score:1)
We know from experiments here on Earth that if you put water into a low pressure / near vacuum environment that it will boil off. No $hit temperature isn't a factor when the environment is so remarkably light on any sort of air pressure.
This sounds like a bunch of researchers made up some convincing grant to pay their bills for a few months already answering a question we could have easily extrapolated from observable phenomena here on this planet.