New Mars Forums

As someone else has recently pointed out, there was a report last year that one or two 'hotspots' had been detected in Hellas Basin by one of the orbiters - Odyssey, I believe(?).
    Admittedly, we've heard little or nothing about them since but why have they not featured as a possible explanation for the methane? Is it that they are too small to account for the quantity of CH4 observed or have they been found to be no more than a thermal glitch in the data, no longer visible on subsequent passes over the area in question?

    My feelings about the methane are rather mixed. While there is almost no doubt in my mind that Mars possesses a biosphere, I tend to think it would be extremely frugal with organic material. It should be holding on to that methane and finding some way to utilise it before it escapes into the atmosphere. Perhaps it's a case of there being a large biosphere in the crust and this methane we're seeing is just what's left after the organisms concerned have recycled 90-something percent of it! These wisps of CH4 are just the 'scraps' of a very 'tight' community which, despite its best efforts,  can't quite manage to save all of the organic material available to it.
    Just a thought.
                                             

Interesting ideas.
    Another no less stimulating idea concerns something we do actually know, rather than stuff we can only speculate about.
    We now know that Opportunity's landing site was once the shallows of a salty sea. If you have a colour-coded topographical globe of Mars, it's easy to see that if Meridiani, which is more or less at the datum level on Mars, was under water, then absolutely enormous areas of Mars must also have been inundated. In fact, vast areas of Vastitas Borealis (the smooth low-lying northern plains) must have been under some kilometres of water!

    Sometimes I think this logical extrapolation of the simple facts we now know to be true is being overlooked. Mars must have had extensive oceans, at least temporarily.
    I find this new information to be quite profound but nobody seems to be oohing-and-aahing about it.
                                        ???

Thanks, Byron, for the reassuring words about how pleasant Cairns will be as places like New York disappear under hundreds of metres of ice and snow!   

    By the way, if you come across any interesting quotes from this Bastardi fella, I'd like to hear the kind of things he has to say about the climate. I take it he's a professionally qualified meteorologist and it sounds like he'd have a much better handle on how the world's weather is or isn't changing over time than most of us do.
    I know how powerful the anti-globalisation, anti-oil-industry, anti-capitalism, (dare I say anti-American) movement has become. While I'm sure there are perfectly good reasons why so many people feel that way about things, and while I may or may not agree with all of their reasoning, it does concern me that the 'global warming' thing could have been boosted and exaggerated because it melds so nicely into that particular political viewpoint.
    If you don't like big business, it's a very handy weapon to be able to say "those big bad capitalists aren't just polluting the world, now they're destroying the planet by gradually turning it into another Venusian hell!" It worries me that the political left, and that probably includes many scientists, are allowing their political passions to cloud their judgment by weakening their objectivity. Again, I may be wrong but I haven't seen enough evidence yet to convince me we're in any serious trouble.

    On the other hand, as a general point, I think we should definitely be actively seeking to free ourselves of dependence on fossil fuels as soon as possible. I don't think we should be pumping CO2 into the air when we don't really know what the long-term consequences might be. (Though, as I've said, that doesn't mean I'm in a spin about any serious and immediate  threat from global warming.)
    I think solar energy is our best bet for the future but I still haven't given up on Cold Fusion as a potential energy source. You may have noticed they're planning  to conduct a review of research into Cold Fusion soon, to examine work done on it over the past 15 years in labs all over the world.
    A few years ago, when I was contemplating a change to a career in journalism, I had occasion to contact Dr. Michael McKubre of SRI International in Menlo Park, California. He is one of the leading researchers into Cold Fusion and his work will be featured at the upcoming review. I communicated with him by telephone and by mail and I was very impressed  that he was so absolutely certain that Cold Fusion was real and that it would revolutionise cheap clean energy production in the near future. He really made it sound like it was in the bag and that it was just a matter of time before it all fell into place - and he's a very nice guy, too!

    I'm enormously optimistic about humanity's future. I believe we're so close to such amazing advances in materials science, energy production, and exobiology (Mars! ) etc. that the world will be a completely different, and better, place in just 10 or 20 years from now.
    Oops! Sorry. There I go, waffling again!       :laugh:

Yes, Byron, you hit the nail on the head precisely with your question about the cause of our heavy rains. There was indeed a tropical low pressure system to the north of Cairns for days. It turned into tropical cyclone 'Grace', only a Category 1 (the lowest strength), and then proceeded south toward Cairns before veering east-south-east and weakening to a tropical low again east of here in the Coral Sea.
    We missed the brunt of its power, only getting moderate winds because it didn't come very close, but it sure stirred up some precipitation!

    It's looking as though this will be our 4th wet season in succession without any serious cyclone problems. And I understand the number and severity of hurricanes in the North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico is also declining.
    This appears to fly in the face of the models and calculations of the 'greenhouse crisis' camp. According to them, we should be getting more and fiercer storms as the planet's temperatures spiral ever higher.

    Without wishing to start a war over the touchy subject of global warming, I honestly think the data are very likely wrong. The much-vaunted 0.7 deg.C rise in average surface temperatures in the past century has come about because the temperature gauges, which used to lie outside villages, have been surrounded by expanding suburbia, with its heat-trapping black tar roads and concrete buildings. Everyone knows it's always hotter in a city than in the surrounding rural areas.
    I wouldn't be at all surprised if any detectable atmospheric changes are the early signs of the end of our current interglacial warm spell. I suspect we may be approaching a new era of very cold weather, which may last for thousands of years. I hope I'm wrong because I feel the cold and my wife can't abide it (! ) but it seems more likely to me than any warming problem.
    Why should I be right and hundreds of scientists wrong? No rational reason beyond the fact that climatologists tell us we're about due for another serious cold-snap and that I've yet to see convincing evidence that global warming is a reality. I know that attitude gets up people's noses but it's just the way I feel about it and my personal observations of everyday weather patterns, year-in-year-out, convince me more and more that the world isn't getting warmer.

    Anyhow, as I've said before, I'm more scared of the freezing scenario I've described than I am of warmer world.
                                             

Hi Cindy and Byron!
    Yes, it is pretty amazing rainfall. Cairns was completely cut off, with all roads in and out impassable due to flooding for about 24 to 36 hours.
    We have very large drainage conduits, though, and within a few days it was hard to see that we'd had such a deluge.

    The coast road from here to Port Douglas is prone to landslides and the heavy rain caused a real beauty this time! Half the road, over a 20 metre stretch, fell into the sea and the other half was liberally sprinkled with rocks up to 20 tonnes in weight. At first, they were talking about the road being closed for a week but, after some feverish work with heavy-lifting equipment, they had one lane open within 24 hours.

    Things seem to have settled down now and the wet season is almost over. The best weather is now on its way ... I just love the winters here. (They're about the same as your winters in Florida, aren't they Byron?)
                                                     

Hi Atomoid!
    No, there was no reference to the dimpling or the stalks on the martian blueberries in the New Scientist article I mentioned.
    Incidentally, I like the ideas being put forward here about the timeline of events at Meridiani. I still don't have a clear sequence in mind that I'm satisfied with but I can see some logic in the notion that the sedimentation occurred after the impacts.
    It would be so much easier, though, if we could put a geologist down on the surface and actually date some rocks. In fact, I'm reasonably sure the crater-counting method of dating planetary surfaces, developed during the lunar exploration era, is misleading us at Mars. I have a feeling Mars' history is too complicated for the basic 'more craters equals older surface' tenet. For this reason, dating the rocks there is of paramount importance in allowing the science of geology on Mars to proceed out of today's welter of conflicting hypotheses.

    I have read reports in years gone by that a region of the martian surface, comparable in area to that of the U.S.A. and stretching from the eastern end of Mariner Valley north-eastward to the edge of Vastitas Borealis, has had at least a kilometre of its superficial layers removed by water erosion. Opportunity's area of haematite lies within that region.
    The appearance of the region on a topographical colour-coded globe of Mars which sits on my shelf looks distinctly like it has been 'smeared' and smoothed by water, like a sandcastle washed over by waves. In fact, large areas of that globe show similar evidence that the whole planet was awash with water at some stage (or stages) in its past.

    It really hasn't surprised me at all that Opportunity is sitting on the bed of an ancient dried-up sea. What has surprised me is how quickly and easily the lander was able to confirm the fact. What extraordinary luck that we happened to land right next to an exposed bed of sedimentary rock!

    The fallout from all this new data will be filling books for years. Mars is giving up its secrets, one by one, and now we even have unequivocal evidence of methane in the atmosphere. These are deliriously exciting times for Marsophiles!
                           :up:      

Just thought I might throw another 2 cents worth into this weather thread.
    16 degrees south of the equator, here in beautiful Cairns Australia, we're supposed to get about 2 metres of rain per annum. Well, we haven't reached that average figure for the last three years but, this year, things have returned to normal ... and then some!
    During the first three weeks of March alone, we recorded 1040 mm of rain. (Just shy of 3 feet 5 inches in the old money.)
    If you're driving through a real downpour, even with the wipers thrashing away at top speed, you have to slow to a crawl because you just can't see more than a few metres in front of you. Spectacular stuff and great fun to watch!
                                         

Yes, thanks Adrian for reminding me of Carl Sagan's garage-dwelling dragon! I'm a great admirer of Dr. Sagan's logical clarity of thought and have some of his books on my bookshelf at home.
    I've never really gone along with his "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" maxim, though. I tend to think you should have a process in place which is capable of detecting and dismissing unsustainable hypotheses, regardless of how ordinary or extraordinary they may be. Even if a new idea or purported discovery is absolutely mind-numbing in its ramifications, your standard regime of analysis should be able to determine its validity, or otherwise, in the usual way. If you have room to set the proof-bar higher because some new hypothesis is revolutionary, then to my mind the bar simply wasn't high enough to begin with.

    For the record, I am well aware of Richard Hoagland's shortcomings and I do not place him in the same category as Carl Sagan by any stretch of the imagination. The great majority of what he preaches very definitely fails, miserably, to clear my standard proof-bar!
    And I certainly don't waste a lot of my time reading up on all his intricate notions.

    Adrian, I believe I understand your frustration with the whole Cydonia thing and, to a very large extent, I share your exasperation with it. Unless we send a landing party right up to the Face, drill into it and find nothing but rock, it will be nigh on impossible to convince the 'believers' that it's just a mesa. Such is the difficulty of proving a negative.
    As I've said, I don't classify myself as a 'believer', but even I will never really know for sure in my own mind that the Face is definitely natural until just such a landing party is organised!

    Does that mean I want to divert resources to such a mission right now? Definitely not! The chance that the Face could be artificial is so small as to relegate its investigation to a very low position on my list of priorities. (But the feint lingering doubts I still entertain mean that, unlike you, I haven't been able to remove it entirely from that list! )
    I, too, am much more interested in the small amounts of methane reported to have been found in the martian atmosphere. As most of you here know, I've argued for some time that Mars has a biosphere, though probably no more than a microbial one. I base this argument on various lines of evidence; most prominently the reality of impact transfer of crustal material from Earth to Mars, and vice versa, and the work of Dr. Gil Levin, of Viking Labeled Release fame.
    Now that water, even if only transient water, is a likely constituent of martian soils, I'm more convinced than ever that there is life also. One of the biggest problems I've had is with the lack of tell-tale metabolites of carbon-based life, such as methane. Hence the interest in the latest data on what is an energetically unstable gas in the presence of oxygen, and which shouldn't exist in martian air unless it is being constantly replenished by some process - possibly a biological process.

    Just before I stop rambling here, I note that questions were raised about why an alien race would place a giant carving on Mars but not the Moon or Earth. Just to exasperate Adrian further ( :;):  ), I could respond by saying how do we know there isn't a carving somewhere on Luna or hidden in the jungles of South America? And what if there is a 'stealth' observation satellite, invisible to radar, orbiting at a Lagrange point somewhere close to Earth?
    Sorry! I'm just playing devil's advocate for the lunatic fringe.
    But, having said that, I don't dismiss these scenarios as being out of the question and I'm prepared to examine any and all evidence that may point to the reality of any of them. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to dismiss as impossible the idea that an alien race might have visited our star system in the past. I don't find this to be a particularly extraordinary idea at all and I think it certainly shouldn't require extraordinary evidence to make it worthy of investigation.

Yes, Rxke.
    I saw a clip on T.V. which showed Dr. Squyres talking about the shallow sea at Meridiani. He referred quite definitely to the inherent suitability of that environment for life to develop and flourish. There was also a very brief comment from another of the mission scientists (I believe), whose name I regret I missed, which sounded very positive about the past potential for life in the area.

    My point is that the whole tone of the announcements being made was markedly different from* anything I've heard presented by NASA on the subject of life on Mars, be it past or present life.
    I got the distinct impression that a paradigm shift has occurred in the way NASA views the likelihood of martian life. It seems to me that they're almost trying to prepare us for the possibility of identifiable fossils being found; a subject which, as Rxke quite correctly points out,  would have been treated with a smugly superior kind of gentle derision by scientists and journalists only a few months ago.

    I may be entirely out of line here, and succumbing to the irresistible romance of the Red Planet, but my guess is that the MER scientists now believe they have a better-than-zero chance of discovering a fossil when Opportunity reaches the next crater.
    They've played their cards pretty close to their chests up to now; successfully keeping their conclusions under wraps until the appropriate public release dates. It's apparent that a great deal of hypothesising and discussion goes on behind closed doors until there can be no serious doubt about the subject of that discussion, which is as it should be.
    The exobiologists on the team, for all we know, may already be half convinced that microbial life has played a part in the formation of some of the sedimentary features we've seen so far. They may just require a few more pieces of the jigsaw before coming out and making a definite statement.

    The coming weeks and months could be very exciting.
                                             

[ * I know many of you are American and would use the form "different than".
     However, the English custom is to use "different from".
     Having been raised in the traditional school of grammar in London during my formative years, I prefer the latter form. Thank you for your kind indulgence!    ]

Ha ha! You got me!
    But I think you cheated a little bit. That small section of a genuine Roman road (if that's what it is and you're not pulling the wool over my eyes once more! ) is so badly weathered as to be very natural-looking. If we could see more of the picture and make out a long straight series of stones disappearing over the horizon, as was typical of Roman roads, then their artificiality would be obvious.
    The fact that the outcrop of rock which Opportunity has been studying is in the internal wall of a crater, and leads nowhere, detracts from any argument that it could have been purpose-built. If it was there before the impactor excavated the crater, why was it not destroyed? If the so-called 'road' was built after the impact occurred, why didn't the builders skirt around the crater instead of awkwardly trying to pave the sloping interior wall?
                                                ???

Thanks for the response, Synthomus.
    I'd just like to state clearly that I don't necessarily think we've found a fossilised crinoid-like creature on Mars. Nature can produce some fascinating shapes without the need for biological intervention and we do need to be careful about interpretations. This is especially true when dealing with rock formations on an alien world, where the processes of erosion aren't well understood.

    However, having said that, I still think it would be nice if the JPL team were to do us the courtesy of making at least some comment on what is the most likely candidate for a fossil that I've yet seen in the pictures from Mars.
    If I were Dr. Squyres, I might be saying something like: "Yes, the shape of this particular section of rock could be interpreted as a fossil of some kind of crinoid-like organism. But, in view of the fact that it's the only section of rock with a plausible fossil-like shape in it, and it's such a small area, we can't make a judgment one way or the other. The probability is that it's just a peculiar rock formation. If we find another shape just like it, on the other hand, that will change the situation markedly. Don't worry, we're always looking and thinking and you'll be the first to know if we find definite proof of past life on Mars!"

    In addition, I don't think NASA has endeared itself to the conspiracy brigade by RATing the fossil-candidate into oblivion. It was a most unfortunate place to use the RAT, of all the places it could have chosen, and has played into the hands of the 'cover-up' fanatics.

    I suppose I shouldn't complain, since the accessibility of these missions to the general public has been outstanding, but I wonder whether it may have been a good PR exercise for NASA to employ a full-time geologist/front-man to prepare daily discussions of the MER findings?
    The 'hit-rate' on the net for these landers has shown their immense popularity with the general public. It might have been sensible to 'keep the pot boiling' by keeping the public more included, by allowing us more access to the thought processes of the mission scientists.
    The recent dearth of up-front communication has been a little frustrating, at least for me.
                                                :bars:

Errorist:-

    I don't see how. Life arose here on Earth and yet the existence of God is a long way from proven.