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Putting The Geology Back Into Martian Science
White Cliffs - Apr 16, 2004 If you find layered sediments, they do not have to be either water-transported or the outpourings of volcanoes. They may be aeolian, that is, wind-blown. On Mars, they may also be a bit strange. Those are simple facts that the Martian Wet Worlders seem to generally forget, or, more to the point, resolutely ignore. Those good folk will not contemplate the simple proposition that the surface of Mars has mostly been shaped by wind-driven erosion and transport. They have this blind spot because they have invested so heavily in the notion that Mars had rivers and oceans of liquid water long ago, and the wetter and warmer past climate needed to make that possible. Here then, in counterpoint, is the Long-winded Model of Mars. This model may account for the enigmatic layered beds of Mars and the canyons and channels they cut them, without invoking unlikely past wetter and warmer climates. I do not claim that it is right in detail, I merely propose that it is likely to be closer to the mark than the Wet Mars Model. The proposed model copes with the apparent total lack of martian sea cliffs, wavecut platforms, boulder and cobble beaches and spits, touching boulder beds in the rivers, undersea canyons, major tributaries, deltas and coastal dune fields. It copes with the glaring absence of carbonate rocks, on a planet with an embarrassing abundance of the ingredients needed, if there ever was a lot of liquid water about. It also copes with impossible physics, impossible chemistry, impossible water and sediment budgets, rivers that apparently ran several kilometres uphill or up their own minor tributaries. It deals with vistas of "river" boulders at landing sites thathave very clearly been seriously wind-sculpted, and which decline to touch each other with almost paranoid dedication. It handles the faint-young-sun paradox, which mandates a colder past Martian surface.
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Mars Rover Science Featured At Astrobiology Conference
Mountain View CA - Apr 22, 2004The third of NASA's Astrobiology Science Conferences -- held every two years at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California -- has just ended. Every one of these has drawn a considerably bigger crowd of scientists than the previous one. This might seem peculiar for what one scientist has described as "the most lively scientific field not to have any actual subject material yet".
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