Posted on 01/25/2007 11:09:55 AM PST by blam
Hints of huge water reservoirs on Mars
19:00 25 January 2007
NewScientist.com news service
David Shiga
Mars once had enough water for a global ocean several hundred metres deep, but where has it gone? (Illustration: NASA/Greg Shirah)
Mars is losing little water to space, according to new research, so much of its ancient abundance may still be hidden beneath the surface.
Dried up riverbeds and other evidence imply that Mars once had enough water to fill a global ocean more than 600 metres deep, together with a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide that kept the planet warm enough for the water to be liquid. But the planet is now very dry and has a thin atmosphere.
Some scientists have proposed that the Red Planet lost its water and CO2 to space as the solar wind stripped molecules from the top of the planet's atmosphere. Measurements by Russia's Phobos-2 probe to Mars in 1989 hinted that the loss was quite rapid.
Now the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has revealed that the rate of loss is much lower. Stas Barabash of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna led a team that used data from Mars Express's ASPERA-3 instrument (Analyzer of Space Plasmas and Energetic Atoms).
Its measurements suggest the whole planet loses only about 20 grams per second of oxygen and CO2 to space, only about 1% of the rate inferred from Phobos-2 data.
If this rate has held steady over Mars's history, it would have removed just a few centimetres of water, and a thousandth of the original CO2.
Huge amounts
Either some other process removed the water and CO2 or they are still present and hidden somewhere on Mars, probably underground, Barabash says.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.newscientist.com ...
Must have been those Martian SUV's
Dried up riverbeds and other evidence imply that Mars once had enough water to fill a global ocean more than 600 metres deep, together with a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide that kept the planet warm enough for the water to be liquid. But the planet is now very dry and has a thin atmosphere.Mars once had it all. Carbon dioxide. Global warmth. Deep oceans. Then Democrats evolved and took away their global warming and now all that's left is dry rot. (Sort of like Pelosi's face.)
All one need to is look thru their home telescope and see those huge water tanks taking up space on Mars. You would think that they would move them out of the neighborhood. Or maybe those are CO2 tanks collecting all our greenhouse gases. /s
Can we evolve that to ...Pelosi has a Martian face?
*In AH-nold voice*
Mahrs Cohre iz eyze! Staht the re-actOR!
Maybe they had global cooling.
Pelosi is definitely straight out of the movie: Mars Attacks!
They did in a sense. The core cooled, stopped spinning, the planet lost its magnetosphere, and without it the atmosphere fell victim to the sun's rays.
Time for side-by-side comparisons of the face at Cydonia and the Pelosi specter ...
Nice picture.
Let's move there and leave the liberals here.
Too many dry martinis...
Ping
"Either some other process removed the water and CO2 or they are still present and hidden somewhere on Mars, probably underground, Barabash says."
Maybe someone came by and "stripmined" the planet's biosphere?
How did Mars lose its magnetic field? Being half the size of Earth, their iron core cooled and hardened. Without a liquid core, no iron rotation, hence no magnetic field.
They sure did - watch this movie and you can see them do it:
Here's another theory.....
Martian citizen were told all the CO2 in the atmosphere was causing 'Global Warming', and something must be done about it NOW.....
They all agreed and worked vigilantly to reduce CO2 levels and cool their world.....
and it worked.
Earth's mag field is generated by the atmosphere. Mars has next to no atmosphere and especially no water vapor. No water vapor, no magnetosphere.
I saw that in the theater as a kid. It was one of my favorites. They re-used those cool space ship models from War of the Worlds.
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