Posted on 03/05/2015 2:40:02 PM PST by BenLurkin
Taking into account the surface of Mars today, a likely location for this water would be in the Northern Plains, which has long been considered a good candidate because of the low-lying ground. An ancient ocean there would have covered about 20 percent of the planet's surface. By comparison, the Atlantic Ocean occupies 17 percent of Earth's surface.
"This ocean had a maximum depth of around 5,000 feet or around one mile deep," Villanueva said. "It's deep - not as deep as the deepest points of our oceans, but comparable to the average depth of the Mediterranean Sea."
By combining the Martian topography with the estimates of water loss, the researchers were able to simulate an ancient ocean on Mars and its escape into space.
As Mars lost its atmosphere over billions of years, the researchers believe it lost the pressure and heat needed to keep water liquid. That caused the ocean to shrink and recede northward, with the remaining water condensing and freezing over the north and south poles and giving Mars the ice caps seen today
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
We should send Sheila Jackson Lee to bring some water. We might also help keep the oceans from rising that way.
And she can pick up the flag.
Its because of that evil Mars Rover, and USA imperialism that caused global….drying. We need to raise taxes.
Did they look under the seat cushions?
Then the title is misleading. The water is there.......................
Manmade CO2 is such a terrible thing. :)
Obviously caused by global warming. The Martians should have passed laws that would have prevented such things. /s
The water is there with Hillary’s emails.
The first salvo of ‘global drying’.
And that’s why there are no canals anymore.
/s
Not just raise taxes, but also buy some carbon credits from Algore and his ChiCom sponsors . . .
How about we send them a big bunch of our Arctic Ice!
So, now we’re warming the whole solar system?
You know what? They’re not going to terraform Mars.
I predict some idiot is going to say it’d be some form of man-made pollution and that we should regard the current Martian state as somehow sacrosanct and unspoiled.
Then a whole chorus is going to start about how Man and His Ways are a kind of infection and we shouldn’t Victimize Mars.
And Elon Musk’s dreams will be completely spoiled.
I think they might also pull this type of idiocy when mining other planets and asteroids becomes really feasible.
As the ocean vaporized, sunlight would have disassociated the hydrogen from the oxygen, the hydrogen escaping into space and the oxygen recombining with the iron in the rocks. And so Mars is red today.
Years ago when Al Gore was running I quipped to a guy how all of our cars and trucks are ruining things. “Even Mar’s ice caps are melting!”
He replied “Oh man - it’s worse than I thought. I really hope Gore gets elected.”
I hear the sarcasm, but it would be pointless to try anyway. Mars doesn't have a molten core, so it doesn't have a magnetic field strong enough to protect an earth-like atmosphere. The solar wind will blow it away, just as it did when Mars cooled.
Without the pressure of an atmosphere, there can't be oceans, rivers, and lakes.
If man is ever going to inhabit that dead rock, we'll have to figure out a way to reheat the core. I don't doubt that we will, but it'll probably be a couple hundred years from now.
Some of the water is there, locked up as ice.
The argument here is that most of it vaporized and left the planet.
It may be possible to regenerate some sort of atmosphere on Mars, but it wont be Earth-like, and it wont persist very long. However, “very long” may be a very long time by human standards. A million years would be quite long for a temporary lease on that much real estate.
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