New Evidence for a Water-Rich History on Mars

[Waspie_Dwarf]

New Evidence for a Water-Rich History on Mars

Berkeley Lab research, shock experiments show how mineral found in Martian meteorites may provide clues to ancient abundance of water

Quote

Mars may have been a wetter place than previously thought, according to research on simulated Martian meteorites conducted, in part, at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

In a study published today in the journal Nature Communications, researchers found evidence that a mineral found in Martian meteorites—which had been considered as proof of an ancient dry environment on Mars—may have originally been a hydrogen-containing mineral that could indicate a more water-rich history for the Red Planet.

  Read More: Berkeley Lab

 

[White Unicorn]

I like this find about the reason the experimentation showed an inaccurate result during the testing itself. When you look at Mars geology features many appear like it was once ocean beds. I always believed Mars had water and life prior to losing it's atmosphere so I really like the new view of Mars.

[qxcontinuum]

so shouldn't we find therefore petrified remains of possible animals which existed ?

we know Mars had all ingredients for life, we know there was water and oxygen etc... 

 

[paperdyer]

Depending how close the remains are to the surface, may be the key.  The closer the remains are/were to the surface the more chance of erosion I'd think.

Think about this, maybe the missing link was/were escaped Martians?

[Waspie_Dwarf]

3 hours ago, qxcontinuum said:

so shouldn't we find therefore petrified remains of possible animals which existed ?

we know Mars had all ingredients for life, we know there was water and oxygen etc...

How many fossils do you see every day? How often do you find petrified remains of extinct animals? Are they scattered all around you so that they are obvious?

If the answer is no (and it will be) then try a little bit of critical thinking and ask yourself, "if fossils aren't everywhere I look on Earth, why would they be on Mars?"

Then, when you have tried that bit of critical thinking, try some more.

Ask yourself this, "early life on Earth was primitive, single celled and microscopic. Large plants and animals only evolved after billions of years. If early Mars was like early Earth why would there be large, obvious fossils in the first place?"

Once you have thought about those questions it should be quite obvious why a couple of rovers, hundreds of millions of km from Earth aren't seeing the remains of animals, even if life DID arise on Mars (and we don't know that it did).

 

3 hours ago, qxcontinuum said:

we know Mars had all ingredients for life, we know there was water and oxygen etc...

My cupboard has all the ingredients for cake, it doesn't mean that there is cake in my cupboard.

The reality is that we just don't know how often life arises, even given the correct conditions. We only have one example to use, Earth, and you can not extrapolate from a single data point.

Edited March 6, 2017 by Waspie_Dwarf
typos.

[taniwha]

3 hours ago, qxcontinuum said:

so shouldn't we find therefore petrified remains of possible animals which existed ?

we know Mars had all ingredients for life, we know there was water and oxygen etc... 

 

Yes it's possible.  Petrified remains, if there are any to be found should be prevalent, no matter how big or how small.   It depends on whether the organisms were entombed in the right mineral preserve.

They might be hard to detect because the sand is constantly shifting and eroding the surface but there might be subterranean vaults worth exploring.

It would be great to find some petrified wood on one of the ancient river beds, or jutting out of a cliff face perhaps.

[Waspie_Dwarf]

20 minutes ago, taniwha said:

Yes it's possible. 

Try actually reading what people post, he didn't ask if it was possible, he said we SHOULD be finding them. That's a very different thing.

[taniwha]

24 minutes ago, Waspie_Dwarf said:

Try actually reading what people post, he didn't ask if it was possible, he said we SHOULD be finding them. That's a very different thing.

There's no reason to believe we shouldn't be finding any fossils if there are any.  It would be rare I agree.

But if there are no fossils, then of course that becomes impossible.

[EBE Hybrid]

I'm not suggesting that Bill Bryson's 'A Brief History of Everything' should be regarded as a text book, but I think the guy checks his facts. One statistic was how unlikely it is for fossilisation to occur, it has very particular requirements, It was suggested that if the human race were to all die now, in a few hundred thousand years you'd only be any to find the fossilised remains of a handful of humans

[taniwha]

1 hour ago, EBE Hybrid said:

I'm not suggesting that Bill Bryson's 'A Brief History of Everything' should be regarded as a text book, but I think the guy checks his facts. One statistic was how unlikely it is for fossilisation to occur, it has very particular requirements, It was suggested that if the human race were to all die now, in a few hundred thousand years you'd only be any to find the fossilised remains of a handful of humans

I'm guessing the comparative lack of oxygen and moisture on mars plus an abundance of silica deposits together with outflows of mud will potentially create and preserve fossils.

[qxcontinuum]

On 3/6/2017 at 3:30 PM, Waspie_Dwarf said:

How many fossils do you see every day? How often do you find petrified remains of extinct animals? Are they scattered all around you so that they are obvious?

If the answer is no (and it will be) then try a little bit of critical thinking and ask yourself, "if fossils aren't everywhere I look on Earth, why would they be on Mars?"

Then, when you have tried that bit of critical thinking, try some more.

Ask yourself this, "early life on Earth was primitive, single celled and microscopic. Large plants and animals only evolved after billions of years. If early Mars was like early Earth why would there be large, obvious fossils in the first place?"

Once you have thought about those questions it should be quite obvious why a couple of rovers, hundreds of millions of km from Earth aren't seeing the remains of animals, even if life DID arise on Mars (and we don't know that it did).

 

My cupboard has all the ingredients for cake, it doesn't mean that there is cake in my cupboard.

The reality is that we just don't know how often life arises, even given the correct conditions. We only have one example to use, Earth, and you can not extrapolate from a single data point.

there is a river called Somes in Romania Transylvania. upstream in the city there is a little hydro plant and the river flow is stopped every day to gather volume. when i was child i used to go there and collect hundreds of petrified creatures. the whole region was a rich sea teaming with life back in cretaceous. so the answer to your question you can find fossils pretty much everywhere. i even found a perfectly conserved scale in its true shine as it was real and it was while walking on a hill top.

on Mars it could have been this one. Look at upper left hand corner.

 

 

[Frank Merton]

The issue of water on Mars is what I would call a non-issue.  It has never been denied.  There is water practically everywhere unless some process has removed it.  The question is more a matter of how much.

As I understand it Mars is now in a deep ice age, but there is not enough to form much in the way of glaciers.  Instead, everything is colder than normal and the water is all frozen underground.  In a few tens of millions of years things will moderate and liquid water on the surface may reappear.  It has to do with details of the orbit, and Mars has wilder swings in its eccentricity than the Earth because of Jupiter, and hence wilder climate swings.

Being too small to have a magnetic field of any strength, it is also directly exposed to solar wind, and would be expected to have had much of its water dissociated into hydrogen and oxygen, with the hydrogen escaping (again because the planet is small it hasn't as much gravity).

[taniwha]

13 hours ago, qxcontinuum said:

there is a river called Somes in Romania Transylvania. upstream in the city there is a little hydro plant and the river flow is stopped every day to gather volume. when i was child i used to go there and collect hundreds of petrified creatures. the whole region was a rich sea teaming with life back in cretaceous. so the answer to your question you can find fossils pretty much everywhere. i even found a perfectly conserved scale in its true shine as it was real and it was while walking on a hill top.

on Mars it could have been this one. Look at upper left hand corner.

 

 

Hey that's a keen eye you have.  I use to look for fossils in the limestone cliffs as a kid. Miles inland and hundreds of metres above ocean level you could find sharks teeth and seashells like the one in your photo. Kool.

[Waspie_Dwarf]

17 hours ago, qxcontinuum said:

so the answer to your question you can find fossils pretty much everywhere

That lack of critical thinking means that you have disproved this statement with your own words.

You said this:

17 hours ago, qxcontinuum said:

there is a river called Somes in Romania Transylvania. upstream in the city there is a little hydro plant and the river flow is stopped every day to gather volume. when i was child i used to go there and collect hundreds of petrified creatures. the whole region was a rich sea teaming with life back in cretaceous.

When you was a child you used to go to a SPECIFIC place where you knew, IN ADVANCE, fossils were present. You weren't just finding them "pretty much everywhere".

This is not the situation on Mars. Until these rover missions it wasn't even known for sure if there had been sea and lake beds to search. Only three tiny areas of Mars have been searched by rovers not specifically designed to search for fossils.

Once again, if you think critically, you will realise why the rovers aren't finding fossils.

[qxcontinuum]

4 hours ago, Waspie_Dwarf said:

That lack of critical thinking means that you have disproved this statement with your own words.

You said this:

When you was a child you used to go to a SPECIFIC place where you knew, IN ADVANCE, fossils were present. You weren't just finding them "pretty much everywhere".

This is not the situation on Mars. Until these rover missions it wasn't even known for sure if there had been sea and lake beds to search. Only three tiny areas of Mars have been searched by rovers not specifically designed to search for fossils.

Once again, if you think critically, you will realise why the rovers aren't finding fossils.

Rovers don't find fossils just because their remote drivers are turning blind eyes on potential clues like the picture above. Naturally if Curiosity should have been more curious would have come closer to investigate what appears from far to be an ammonite. you can't possible find anything in life if you disregard details. Same like ppl rushing through their busy lives or texting too much on their phones not finding any clues of ancient past that sometimes lies on grounds.

[Frank Merton]

It might be that the robots don't spot fossils because of the mindset of those who designed the robots, or it might be because such detail work is beyond present robot technology, or it might be because they aren't there.  The third possibility, being the most likely, at least to me, doesn't require evidence.  The other two do.

I wonder if a case could be made out of this for manned exploration, but considering the costs, I suspect by the time we are ready to do that AI will have advanced enough to eliminate the argument.

I realize that sooner or later human beings will go into space, but now it is not the time, imo, as it is too expensive and dangerous and only done for political reasons. 

[bmk1245]

11 hours ago, qxcontinuum said:

Rovers don't find fossils just because their remote drivers are turning blind eyes on potential clues like the picture above. Naturally if Curiosity should have been more curious would have come closer to investigate what appears from far to be an ammonite. you can't possible find anything in life if you disregard details. Same like ppl rushing through their busy lives or texting too much on their phones not finding any clues of ancient past that sometimes lies on grounds.

Well then, I guess you are mining diamonds and rubies in your backyard, aren't yea?

Ammonites "appeared" ~4 billion years after Earth was born, while open waters on Mars disappeared ~3.5 billion years ago. And thats the clue why scientists aren't wasting valuable resources on chasing "ghosts".

[taniwha]

1 hour ago, bmk1245 said:

Well then, I guess you are mining diamonds and rubies in your backyard, aren't yea?

Ammonites "appeared" ~4 billion years after Earth was born, while open waters on Mars disappeared ~3.5 billion years ago. And thats the clue why scientists aren't wasting valuable resources on chasing "ghosts".

I guess we can't be sure one way or the other then.

[bmk1245]

On 3/11/2017 at 5:41 PM, taniwha said:

I guess we can't be sure one way or the other then.

Sure as '100% sure'? Of course not, more likely '99.999...9% sure'.

[taniwha]

On 14/03/2017 at 9:10 PM, bmk1245 said:

Sure as '100% sure'? Of course not, more likely '99.999...9% sure'.

After we have explored 99.999...9% of Mars then I might agree with you