Windows onto the abyss: cave skylights on Mars

Planetary Society ^ | 5-23-07 | Emily Lakdawalla

[Hot Tabasco]

Looking at that close-up, that could very well be uranus.....

[MHGinTN]

Make that two o’clock shadow to seven o’clock. Dumb doofus ...

[P-40]

Looks like a lake full of oil.

[tet68]

Interesting that some of those holes are rather close to impact craters. If the impacts were after the holes were formed one would expect to see them caved in or perhaps even collapsed if such a large opening existed underneath...
if the holes came after the impacts then their origins could be fairly recent.

Many questions.

[fish hawk]

As Glenn Beck says: I'm no scientist but I am a thinker. Something is rotten on Mars. For one thing if it was a cave, If the sun was shining directly into it one would see the sides for a ways down. If the sun was to the right or left of it, one would see one side or the other for a distance inside.

Also the pictures of A and B, I detect a thin ridge or mountain on the right. If it had a round hilled top it would make the round shadow. The near craters have shadows on the same side as this one.

I believe it is a phony picture put on the web by Al Gore and in a week he will tell us that it is from the Global Warming on Earth.

[Comstock1]

Sinkholes?

[Grut]

On the "100 meter" pic, the irregularities at the top and bottom of the rim seem impossible... if it's a hole, they're just hanging in midair. It really does look like a lake of something dark.

[anymouse]

"ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.

[Grut]

OK, bad phrasing. By “top and bottom of the rim” I mean the (roughly) twelve and five o’clock positions where the rim meets the dark whatever-it-is. Sorry.

[samtheman]

Are These Caves On Mars?

[BenLurkin]

[Maeve]

“For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”

[wally_bert]

There Was Life On Mars In 1973.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/lifeonmars/

[Keflavik76]

Here’s a picture of a crater lake in Ghana.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosumtwi_crater

[Born to Conserve]

My guess: a many million year old frozen ocean is covered with hundreds of feet of blown soil, meteors hit the area leaving craters, then, as the frozen ocean evaporates, the soil collapses into sink holes.

[GregoryFul]

Not just one, but seven of these odd pretty round “holes” have been imaged. I wonder if they are all the same size?

[sig226]

Now all the air will get out.

It’s Bush’s fault.

[SunkenCiv]

Remember when some nuts thought the earth was hollow and flying saucers came from there?

What? You mean that isn't true? Finally, I can get some sleep.

[SunkenCiv]

"This black spot is one of seven possible entrances to subterranean caves", as opposed to caves found above ground. :')

Far be it for me to fan the enthusiasm of the 'Mars has oceans' crowd, but I wonder if this is the hole remaining from a long-gone, buried berg of ice. Another possibility is a cave caused by steady dripping from a vanished lake of surface ice. Most likely though, IMHO, these seven "caves" are impact craters. Otherwise, these are all that remains of volcanic gas vents.

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[SunkenCiv]

Life is a Gas: Methane Might Support Underground ET
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 23 September 2004 06:24 am ET
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/methane_production_040923.html

A new test that produced methane under conditions mimicking the deep interiors of Earth and Mars lends support to an idea that the gas could theoretically support unseen colonies of microbes on both worlds. And the study hints at the possibility of a potential vast supply of petroleum products... The research was led by Henry Scott of Indiana University at South Bend and was published online last week by the National Academy of Sciences... the late Thomas Gold, of Cornell University, theorized in the 1990s that petroleum products are instead created from gaseous hydrocarbons, like methane, that have been inside Earth since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. Gold figured the gas migrates from the mantle toward the surface through cracks in the planet’s crust. Some is trapped, and some is chemically altered into oil and coal. The lab work shows that part of Gold’s theory is plausible... His still-controversial argument was that microbes live down there and eat the oil and other hydrocarbons, using them as energy sources instead of the Sun. Gold proposed there was as much life below, in terms of mass, as on the surface. Several discoveries have shown that life can indeed thrive in seemingly inhospitable conditions. In 2002, scientists reported finding organisms 660 feet (200 meters) below Idaho. They eat hydrogen and belch methane. Other microbes are known to use methane for energy. And life has been found to endure temperatures of 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 Celsius) around hot springs under the sea. Gold’s creatures would only need to endure 248 degrees Fahrenheit (120 Celsius) to live a few miles down, he calculated... Scott’s research team squeezed iron oxide, water and calcite to intense pressure and applied the sort of heat common to Earth’s mantle — up to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius). Methane formed in a simple chemical reaction.

Life Underground
Written by G. Jeffrey Taylor
Hawai’i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, University of Hawai’i
http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Dec96/LifeUnderground.html

In an article in the July, 1992 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Thomas Gold (Cornell University) has tried to calculate the amount of subsurface life in comparison with the above ground life all around us. His estimate necessarily contains some guesses, but all are reasonable. Assuming that the upper 5 kilometers of Earth has a porosity of 3% (porosity is the amount of space available for water in a rock or sediment), and that 1% of the mass of the water filling the pore spaces was bacteria, then the total mass of bacteria would be 200 trillion metric tons. Putting it another way, Gold points out that this is equivalent to a layer on the order of 1.5 meters high covering the entire Earth! This is more than the existing plant and animal life on the surface, which is estimated to be about a trillion metric tons. Even if Gold’s estimate is off by a factor of 100, the amount of subsurface life is at least equal to that on the surface.

Deep Dwellers
Microbes thrives far below ground
by Richard Monastersky
March 29, 1997
http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc97/3_29_97/bob1.htm

The discoveries not only redefine how scientists view the modern Earth, they also raise intriguing questions about the origin of life and the possibility that microbes survive today beneath the surface of Mars and other planets. Deep biology — the study of subsurface bacteria and similar organisms called archaea — has its roots in the 1920s, when a geologist and a microbiologist from the University of Chicago collected bacteria from oil deposits in sedimentary rocks 600 m below ground. The two scientists posited that these subterranean organisms could have evolved from microbes that were buried 340 million years ago, when the sedimentary rocks initially formed.

OBITUARY — Thomas Gold
Astrophysicist and innovator; 84
June 27, 2004
by Jeremy Pearce
New York Times News Service
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040627/news_1m27gold.html

Late in his career, Dr. Gold returned to studies of Earth, and he pursued yet another unconventional theory about the origins of oil and methane. His idea was that oil and other hydrocarbons are being constantly generated by a microbial process and are not chiefly the result of decaying organic plant matter. He advanced his ideas in the book “The Deep Hot Biosphere” (1999), and proposed that space programs begin to search for subterranean life, drilling for living microbes on Mars and other planets.