'Four-billion-year chill' on Mars

BBC ^ | 7/21/05 | David Whitehouse

[PBRSTREETGANG]

Wow! Sounds like their "Kyoto Treaty" really worked!

[Little Pig]

Wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that most of that warmth came during the period when the martian volcanoes were active. If the planet was always cold, then it would follow that a pretty good portion of the water it had is still there. Except for the stuff evaporated by the volcanoes, the only way it could lose water would be through sublimation of the ice on the planet's surface, and since much of the ice is subsurface, I would think that process would be pretty slow.

[Paleo Conservative]

They heard this through the grapevine?

[martin_fierro]

Cold, yes, but as a youth I knew some hotties there.

[Old Professer]

The study is bound to be controversial showing a disparity between those scientists who look at pictures of Mars to discern its history and those who study the only pieces of the planet we can examine in detail in the laboratory.

Some disparity; on the order of having a copy of Hustler or hiring a street walker.

[Larry Lucido]

Mars girls are easy?

[tophat9000]

"First, we evaluated what the meteorites could have experienced during ejection from Mars, 11 to 15 million years ago."

Ah saying Mars has "always been cold and was rarely above freezing" based on a meteor sample "ejection from Mars, 11 to 15 million years ago."?..

By definition the meteor sample is only valid for data on Mars up till the time they were ejection from Mars...

you have a, 11 to 15 million years till now, data drop out there...

really puts a damper on making overall blanket assertion on the total Mars geo.history...don't you think?

[dartuser]

The gas argon is present in the meteorites as well as in many rocks on Earth as a consequence of the radioactive decay of potassium. A noble gas, argon is not very chemically reactive, and because the decay rate is precisely known it can be used to date rocks ... if you assume there was no argon in the rock to begin with.

[RetiredArmy]

Was this chill caused by global warming caused by the little Martian people using fossil fuels to run their cars, heat their homes, fly their space ships to invade planet Earth?

[LibWhacker]

OTOH, ten million years is only two or three one-thousandth of four billion years. So we have to be careful about saying it's not a representative look at Martian history... It'd be a little like saying we don't have a good understanding of American history if we don't know anything about the last six or seven months of it.

[Notforprophet]

Ping

[tet68]

Mars has likely never been sufficiently warm for liquid water to have flowed on the surface for extended periods of time.

So the super giant canyon on mars was not made by erosion over a long period of time?

So if it was made in a relatively SHORT period of time,
where did that tremendous volume of water come from?
Where did it go?

[Night Hides Not]

Was this chill caused by global warming caused by the little Martian people using fossil fuels to run their cars, heat their homes, fly their space ships to invade planet Earth?

It had to take a lot of fossil fuels to pre-position all of those machines for Spielberg's movie. What other explanation could there be?

[martin_fierro]

Mars girls are easy?

Alas, not with me. < |:(~

[sonofatpatcher2]

That's horsepucky! It was only 3,894,216 years...

[LibWhacker]

I have a very strong feeling that Mars is going to teach us a whole boatload of geological tricks that we've never seen on planet Earth!

[megatherium]

Didn't the Elton John song "Rocket Man" say something about Mars not being a good place to raise your kids, in fact it's cold as hell?

[Trimegistus]

Wow! I guess the "Mars Needs Women" problem is SOLVED!

[TexasTransplant]

I only have records for about 3 1/2 billion years (mostly Elvis and Beatles), so they may be right.