A third of Mars once covered by ocean: study

AFP on Yahoo ^ | 6/13/10 | AFP

[NormsRevenge]

PARIS (AFP) – A huge, potentially life-giving sea likely covered more than a third of Mars some 3.5 billion years ago, according to a study released Sunday.

Spread over an area the size of the Atlantic Ocean, it would have straddled the north pole and contained the equivalent of a tenth of the water on Earth.

For decades scientists have argued as to whether the Red Planet once harboured bodies of water big enough to help nourish a true hydrological cycle marked by evaporation and rainfall.

Recent evidence suggests as much, but doubts remained.

To dig deeper, Gaetano Di Achille and Brian Hynek of the University of Colorodo in Boulder sifted through huge stores of images collected by NASA's Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) in the late 1990s and other more recent European and US satellite-based monitoring systems.

The data was not new, but the researchers were the first to link up all available information on Mars' terrain into a single computer-driven model.

The study, published in Nature Geoscience, found 52 river-delta deposits scattered across the planet.

More than half occurred at about the same elevation, and thus probably marked the boundary of the once-massive sea.

All of these would have been connected either directly to the ocean, or to its groundwater table along with several large, adjacent lakes.

The scientists calculated that the ancient sea covered 36 percent of the planet's surface and contained about 124 million cubic kilometres (30 million cubic miles) of water.

[SunkenCiv]

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[bigheadfred]

From a website at your link, thule.org.

“Note: Humans reading this who work for various intelligence organizations, NSA, CIA, DIA, FEMA, etc., homeland insecurity and social mind control experts, be aware that you have been compartmentalized. Wake up! You are a part of the greatest genocidal murder plot in recorded history, far more heinous than the holocaust. You are just a cog in the wheel for the rulers of planet Earth. Cannon fodder. They won’t need you after the infrastructure breaks down, your usefulness will be over. “

LOL. Good thing I ain’t hooman.

[SunkenCiv]

Yeah, much of that site is pretty haywire (nice that you followed through a couple levels of links, though, I’m flattered).

[bigheadfred]

I read quite a bit. I actually read most of the articles that go with the thread. How many else can say that? Pretty much use this place to unwind. I follow a lot of the GGG links you post and bookmark items I want to explore further. So I say a lot of idiotical things. It is just for fun. I am just the monkey on the outside of the bars throwing the feces back in.

This is the "view" off my front porch right now.

To me, it is fantastic. Crescent moon with Venus so bright. To so many others, well...

[SunkenCiv]

I couldn’t see it was you on that branch, too many leaves on this tree. ;’)

[SunkenCiv]

• Small Comets and Our Origins
• Proof of Life on Mars
• Moon Has 100 Times More Water, New Study Suggests

[John Valentine]

So much for your supposition that it is an "ordinary rocky planet."

It is not a supposition; it is an observation, and not only that, it is an observation that is true. By the way, you don't score points against the notion that Mars is not an ordinary rocky planet by oberving that it is not a gas giant. Your ability to reason, or the lack of it is on visible display here.

A super nova forms the accretion disk that becomes a new sun and planets. Carbon, iron, magnesium, etc. were not formed in the big bang, they came much later.

So what? I never claimed that planetary materials came from the "Big Bang". I only indicated that I wanted to keep the discussion limited to planetary formation. So, let's do that, please. Please.

Planetesmals form into planets through impact, accretion, and merger. All of these are kinetic processes between massive bodies and all of them produce heat, as does the increased gravitation caused by the increase in mass.

Yes, of course, but the energy involved in the accretion of planets likely did not involve as much energy as you postulate, for the reason that the planetesmals were already way down the gravity well, and sure, enery was converted to heat as the planets accreted, but your hypothesis seems to be that the heat would drive water off. That is not only pure speculation, it flies in the face of facts that we can observe within our own solar system.