Mars Used To Look More White Than Red

popularmechanics.com ^ | 05/26/2016 | William Herkewitz

[BenLurkin]

Had you searched the sky with a telescope just a few hundred thousand years ago, you would have struggled to find a red planet. Instead, you would have seen a gleaming-white ice ball where Mars should be. A team of astronomers led by Isaac Smith, an astrophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, has collected the first concrete evidence that Mars has just exited an extreme ice age, one so intense it would have put Earth's recent frosty foray to shame.

Using cameras and a radar-pinging device on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Smith's team deduced this history by dating the miles-deep layers of snow and ice packed onto the Red Planet's northern pole. They found that only a mere 370,000 years ago, "Mars would have actually looked more white than red," says Smith. The Mars research is outlined today in the journal Science.

Peering Into Ice

When scientists wish to peer back into the history of Earth's changing climate, they can dig down into our polar caps and extract long tubular ice cores. As snow and ice slowly accumulates on our poles, subtle snapshots of Earth's past climate get buried. This information is locked into gas bubbles or sediments in the ice; dissecting sections of the ice can reveal a detailed history of our planet.

[ghosthost]

“gleaming white iceball” is funny

[MeganC]

So Mars and the Earth had an ice age at the same time...and now they’ve mysteriously warmed up at the same time.

Dammit, we’ve got to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!!

[SES1066]

Is this part of that ‘white privilege’ we’ve been hearing about? Has anyone informed the Academics of this or the BLMers?

[LegendHasIt]

I find it hilarious that on my “Latest Articles” FR entry page, the article just below it is about Elizabeth Warren / Fauxahontas.

[MeganC]

“Mars Used To Look More White Than Red”

LOL...so did the Democrat party!!!

[sparklite2]

Terraforming? Not to worry.
Ecofreaks in the future will
be successful in having Mars
declared off limits to preserve
the planet for future generations.

[Paladin2]

ManBearPig missed the call....

[sparklite2]

With meteor showers unabated by
significantly dense atmosphere,
Mars would eventually have as
many ice holes as there are on earth.

[mountn man]

Damn SUVs are every where.

[Yo-Yo]

Everybody knows that Mars used to be a moon of a larger planet, which exploded and created the asteroid belt, spinning Mars off to become it's own planet.

At least that's what Richard Hoagland told me.

[LegendHasIt]

Heh.

[ghosthost]

I don’t know about that. Earth is so much larger, I’m pretty sure we have at least 10 times as many ice holes.

[I want the USA back]

So Mars finally did something about its White Privilege.

[IronJack]

I have it on good authority that when the War of the Worlds started more than 100 years ago, Mars was very red.

[TnTnTn]

Pesky global warming-Martians should have gotten rid of fossil fuels and instituted a carbon tax!

[Verginius Rufus]

What about Bode's Law? There's supposed to be a planet where Mars is.

[SERKIT]

There goes the neighborhood!

[wally_bert]

Maybe the inhabitants of that planet left and blew up on the way out since they thought they were going to be victims of some kind of section eight colonization.

[Yo-Yo]

Not being an astronomer, I had to Google Bode's Law. What I found in Wikipedia was:

The hypothesis correctly anticipated the orbits of Ceres (in the asteroid belt) and Uranus, but failed as a predictor of Neptune's orbit and has since been discredited further.

Then again, I was tongue in cheek regarding Richard "Face on Mars" Hoagland and his, shall we say 'creative' theories about Mars and his hyperdimensional physics.

And we won't even get started about Hoagland's theory that Earth's Moon has a shattered glass dome on it that the Apollo Astronauts photographed.

But Richard was always entertaining to listen to on Art Bell's late night radio program.