So, where did the water on Mars come from?

The Toronto Star ^ | 3/7/04 | Terence Dickinson

[LibWhacker]

The Mars rover Opportunity's examination of Martian rocks last week provided the first convincing evidence that our neighbour world was once "awash" in water, as one NASA scientist described it.

But where did the water come from? And why does Mars have no liquid water now, while Earth apparently has been covered with the stuff for 4 billion years?

Scientists are just beginning to piece the story together, and it goes right back to the beginning.

Mars, like Earth, was formed from dusty and rocky debris left over after the sun was born 4.57 billion years ago.

Initially, there were more planets in our solar system than the nine we recognize today, perhaps twice as many.

Earth suffered an especially brutal encounter with one of them 4.52 billion years ago, when a wayward body the size of Mars smashed into it. Our planet was almost split in two. Molten rock was splashed out into space and later condensed in orbit to form the moon.

The impact blasted the Earth's atmosphere into space, boiled off any water and turned our planet's surface into a sea of molten rock. Venus, Mercury and Mars, the other approximately Earth-sized planets, likely suffered similar collisions around the same time, though no large moons remain orbiting those worlds.

By 4.4 billion years ago, the Earth's surface had cooled enough to have a solid crust.

The formation of the planets was an inefficient process and for millions of years the Earth and the other planets were bombarded by what astronomers call planetesimals — essentially leftover chunks from the birth of the solar system, up to a few hundred kilometres in diameter.

By 3.9 billion years ago, the bombardment began to subside, but evidence for it is visible in binoculars when you look at the craters on the moon, the majority of which date from 3.9 billion to 4.4 billion years ago, when the planetesimals were raining down.

The puzzling part of this is that Earth's oceans, and now probably the water that was on Mars, both date from this period. Where did it come from?

The only reasonable answer is comets. Comets were formed farther out from the sun than Earth, but in such abundance that they also rained down in the early solar system.

They came into the inner solar system as frozen water — giant snowballs — depositing vast amounts of liquid water on Earth and apparently on Mars too.

Because of Earth's distance from the sun, our planet's surface temperature remains, on average, between the freezing and boiling points of water.

Moreover, Earth's atmosphere acts like a lid, trapping most of the moisture.

Mars, on the other hand, is too far from the sun to stay warm and too small to gravitationally trap a dense enough atmosphere to bottle up what warmth it does have.

The comet-fed oceans it likely had either escaped into space or ended up trapped in cold storage as permafrost.

To test these ideas, the Mars rovers will continue their explorations.

The comet part of the equation will be investigated this summer, when two comets float into Earth's sky in May.

They are expected to be bright enough to allow astronomers to examine them for further clues to the origin of water on Earth and Mars.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terence Dickinson is editor of Skynews magazine and author of books for backyard astronomers.

[hosepipe]

One things certain,, Humans love a good story...

[SoCal Pubbie]

Mars Needs Women:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060672/

[LibWhacker]

Lots of hydrogen - lots of oxygen - lots of energy....sounds like a recipe for lots of water.

Bump!

[Consort]

Water balloons.

[ASA Vet]

I happen to think that a lot of the water that is on the earth, came from Mars

Our ancestors brought it with them.

[P-Marlowe]

Your ancestors are from Mars?

[Qwinn]

"To have been awash with water, Mars had to have two things, the needed temperature range and sufficient atmosphere."

And the problem with sufficient atmosphere is that Mars is not large enough to have enough gravity to hold a respectable atmosphere in place. Which, to me, points to the idea that Mars was once larger than it is now. That would seem rather hard to explain, but here's my science-fiction crack at it.

There was an intelligent civilization on Mars long ago. Like Earth, it had a Nitrogen-Oxygen atmosphere, but in a different ratio and with other elements as well. They reached a level of science approaching ours, including the technology to initiate a nuclear fission reaction.

Those familiar with the development of nuclear technology may be aware that the guys who initially began a reaction at Trinity had some major cojones. See, there was a sizable number of scientists at the time who believed that a nuclear reaction in our atmosphere would be self-sustaining, and that it would use our atmosphere as fuel. Thank God it didn't happen... but what if that was only due to the particular makeup and percentages of the elements of our atmosphere? What if a different ratio of nitrogen to oxygen -would- trigger such a chain reaction, or a third element could provide a catalyst to keep the reaction going?

So. They set off a nuke. It began a chain reaction in their atmosphere. The primary element, nitrogen, fused. A whole -hell- of a lot of the mass of the planet was blown off in the reaction, accounting for it's smaller size and inability to hold an atmosphere now.

Additional: do you know what you get when you fuse two nitrogen atoms together? You get silicon. That would be... sand. Mars has a whole lot of sand.

Basically, what I'm getting at is that if the scientists pre-Trinity had been right about a nuclear reaction in the atmosphere setting off a chain reaction that would fuse the nitrogen in our atmosphere, Earth would look very very similar to Mars a million years from now.

It's a theory I play with when I think about writing my Great American Science Fiction Novel :)

Qwinn

[Don Joe]

Do you share?
Not after it's wet...

Get some Cheroots, and then cut 'em in half. <g,d&r>

[governsleastgovernsbest]

Thanks so much for passing this along. One more reason I love FR - my fellow FReepers are a virtually infinite source of knowledge!

[donh]

Heat combines free hydrogen and free oxygen, and electricity separates them? Has anybody combined the two elements into water using artificial heat?

Artificial heat? Can I get organic heat at my local grocery co-op?

[kjam22]

Oddly enough, there are SOME who say the flood was not just an event that happened here on the earth, but was a literal cataclysm..

And the bible says that before the flood, it had never rained on planet earth. Sounds like something cataclysmic happened to me.

[tm22721]

in a word, GOD.

Took 12 posts to get this reply !

BUMP

[donh]

The ancient predecessors of John Carter, Warlord of Mars, teleported back here with all the water.

...

Actually, the Oort cloud contains massive amounts of cometary material, and I'd suspect the odds are not great that we actually have a reliable notion of what ratios of heavy water they contain, since we haven't sampled much, and their sources seem likely to have been diverse. If there's someplace in the solar system where water is in abundance, then odds are, that's where our water came from. I'm betting on the steady accrection theory--the water's here because it is steadily (or unsteadily) renewed from cometary material.

[Qwinn]

Hrmmm... I have a feeling I wasn't the one you meant to reply to.

Qwinn

[gitmo]

Easy. The Bush administration destroyed the martian atmosphere and used all the water.

Doesn't sound plausible. They would have polluted the water and left it to fester.

[gitmo]

Where did the water come from? "The only reasonable answer is comets."
So then, where did the water in the comets come from?

Mars?

[SunkenCiv]

---

The Big Splash: A Scientific Discovery That Revolutionizes the Way We View the Origin of Life, the Water We Drink, the Death of the Dinosaurs, the Creation of the Oceans, the Nature of the Cosmos, and the Very Future of the Earth Itself by Louis A. Frank and Patrick Huyghe

---

[SunkenCiv]

Small Comets and Our Origins
University of Iowa | circa 1999 | Louis A. Frank
Posted on 10/19/2004 11:13:25 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/1250694/posts

[JoeV1]

The puzzling part of this is that Earth's oceans, and now probably the water that was on Mars, both date from this period.

"Where did it come from? The only reasonable answer is comets.

It is reasonable. Who first proposed comets as the source of Earth's water?

Any possibility God had anything to do with this?

Just thought I'd ask.

[shellshocked]

Where? The mother of all Hydrodstorms.