Aug 042011
Looks like Mars might still have some liquid water, at least of the muddy & briny variety:
3 Responses to “Liquid water on Mars *today*”
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Looks like Mars might still have some liquid water, at least of the muddy & briny variety:
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Hot damn, that’s some neat news!
I’m still waiting for them to find the place where the bald headed people with the golden colored eyes shoot bees at you… now, that would be something!
See any problem with this concept? The mud melts in summer and the saltwater flows downhill.
How many thousands, or even millions, of years can this go on for before all the water in the mud is depleted, and there’s nothing left to melt and flow?
You wouldn’t have to have much melt per year at all over a long period of time to make that happen.
There’s something odd going on up there, but I think CO2 rather than H2O is the basis of it.
> How many thousands, or even millions, of years can this go on for before all the water in the mud is depleted, and there’s nothing left to melt and flow?
Billions, potentially. Do not fall into the same pseudo-logical trap that has ensnared the Intelligent Designers and the Fine Tuners: just because it *seems* vastly unlikely doesn’t mean it actually is.
Consider: A billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet. Lots of subsurface water in the form of mud, caves willed with water, etc. But things went wrong, the planet started losing atmosphere and got cold. All the subsurface water froze solid. With no more tectonic activity, no real rainfall and almost no air pressure, erosion drops to *squat.* So you have a frozen mudball buried a hundred feet deep. In fact, you have *billions* of such frozen mudballs scattered over the planet. Some potentially *kilometers* below the surface. How many millions or billions of years will it take for the weak erosive forces of Mars to cut down all the way to every last one of ’em? On Earth, where erosion is vastly faster, we’re still seeing pre-Cambrian rocks being exposed to the air for the very first time in half a billion years *today.* In fact, a lot of these pre-Cambrian rocks are only being exposed because someone is digging them up. Left on their own, they might have stayed comfortably buried for another half billion years.
And the subsurface rock temperature on Earth is much higher than on Mars. Go down more than a foot or so, and the temperature of Martian dirt might never get within spitting distance of the freezing point of water. So that frozen mudball might very happily stay a frozen mudball from now until the Sun goes funny in a few billion years.
> I think CO2 rather than H2O is the basis of it.
Atmospheric conditions on Mars allow for the presence of liquid water (muddy, briny water, but water). Atmospheric conditions on Mars do not permit the presence of liquid CO2.