Green Martian valley?

Is there still volcanic and geological activity on Mars?

If so then that would be enough heat to melt the ice (in places) - ice which has been proven to be there by the way.

Rus, if you still don't beleive there is water there.. then check out the links.

See here.

Also, "NASA announces discovery of water on Mars."

Additionally, this.

There is no volcanic activity on Mars anymore.

There is no liquid water, water is an ice-crystal in the atmosphere and sublimes to form the ice in various other locations, or just forms a frost.

without volcanic activity, please explain the presence of methane and more importantly, formaldehyde in the atmosphere of Mars.

And, by the way, the area circled in red is the subject area, and it is most assuredly greenish, but that's not the issue, is i?.

you are failing terribly my "planetary geologist"...why not set aside your ancient paradigms?

curiosity is at the root of all true discovery.

and by the way, please comment on this MOC image (besides your previous derisive post).

It is most assuredly genuine and unaltered, but you knew that, didn't you?

Originally posted by jdjaguar
without volcanic activity, please explain the presence of methane and more importantly, formaldehyde in the atmosphere of Mars.

And, by the way, the area circled in red is the subject area, and it is most assuredly greenish, but that's not the issue, is i?.

you are failing terribly my "planetary geologist"...why not set aside your ancient paradigms?

curiosity is at the root of all true discovery.

Explain Neptune's primary composition being *gasp* Methane!

I guess it's just one giant volcano.

(Point is you need to learn to critically think, and realize that compounds are not created by one source alone...but usually are created by stars and captured by planets during and after formation as trace-compounds etc.)

And the actually Valley in the picture is no where near Green, it is entirely deprived of intensity in the image, how about boosting the contrast to see what you can?

Originally posted by jdjaguar
and by the way, please comment on this MOC image (besides your previous derisive post).

It is most assuredly genuine and unaltered, but you knew that, didn't you?

It's entirely without substance.

Firstly, you claim it's an MOC picture, but it could be a picture of your bathroom wall at 5x magnification.

You need to post it's original source, so that all of us can see the context of what we're looking at.

Originally posted by Stratrf_Rus
There is no volcanic activity on Mars anymore.

Then why did NASA itself suggest lava flows on the Martian surface, in 2000? See the links.

Originally posted by Stratrf_Rus
There is no liquid water, water is an ice-crystal in the atmosphere and sublimes to form the ice in various other locations, or just forms a frost.

It's generally accepted that there's water beneath the surface which permeates upwards to form ground ice. Furthermore, take a look at this quote.

"Even if you never got liquid water to the surface you might be able to sequester organic materials, prebiotic chemistry or life, whatever, in the ground ice" from the NASA announcement article I posted. Didn't you read it?

Originally posted by SteveR

Originally posted by Stratrf_Rus
There is no volcanic activity on Mars anymore.

Then why did NASA itself suggest lava flows on the Martian surface, in 2000? See the links.

Originally posted by Stratrf_Rus
There is no liquid water, water is an ice-crystal in the atmosphere and sublimes to form the ice in various other locations, or just forms a frost.

It's generally accepted that there's water beneath the surface which permeates upwards to form ground ice. Furthermore, take a look at this quote.

"Even if you never got liquid water to the surface you might be able to sequester organic materials, prebiotic chemistry or life, whatever, in the ground ice" from the NASA announcement article I posted. Didn't you read it?

1) Volcanism on Mars is long over (though hot spots may still exist deep in the mantle of that world). Basalts and other mafic rocks are dated about 3.5 billion years old on that world.

2) NASA has a problem of ideologues at the moment. A bunch of scientist who accept yes there's improbable (near impossible) conditions for any world that life may "almost form" (which is what they mean by organic chemistry).

Then there's the volcal Press-panzies who spout off crap about how (Mars seems like it would be an Earth).

Mars is more like the Moon than the Earth. In fact Mars is almost nothing like the Earth.

Both Mars and the Moon have hemispherical highlands and lowlands. Both bodies have been geologically dead for a while. Both bodies have little to no atmosphere. Both bodies have little to no water (even though there is H2O on Mars the entire amount of H2O that is free is probably enough to fill a sizeable Lake on the Earth).

Both bodies have extensive lava flows forming plains.

Both bodies are extensively cratered.

The only reason NASA keeps spouting that Mars is "Earth's cousin" or some crap is because it gets them attention (and thus money).

The Earth has no extensive geological feature except for "stable platforms" or Cratons. Cratons are generally highly-metamorphosed and ancient rock that is covered in a relatively thick layer of sediment except where exposed such as the Huron Shield.

The Earth is highly volcanic.

The volume of water on the Earth probably comprises the volume of Mars' core.

The Earth has a much thicker atmosphere than Mars.

The Earth has an Atmosphere mostly of Nitrogen; Mars' atmosphere is entirely CO2 with traces of water vapor and oxygen and nitrogen.

The Earth has a dynamic system that allows life to flourish by constantly replenishing equilibrated sources (that is an area made inhospitable by life's waste).

An infertile ground is made fertile by a volcano...etc.

And these geological processes allowed life to become advanced enough that life itself now renews its environ.

Life has completely reworked the Earth as it needs...

You cannot come to Earth and not be mistaken that there is life! Huge carbonate beds hundreds of miles across....

Mars has none of this.

The only place these NASA folk state that there is a potential for life is in Press conferences, they never would dare publish this in a Scientific Journal because they'd be laughed at.

Originally posted by Stratrf_Rus
Firstly, you claim it's an MOC picture, but it could be a picture of your bathroom wall at 5x magnification.

Look here.

The url in the top right corner is the source.

thanks Steve.

I have the source image on my hard drive, but I couldn't upload it to picture trail due to memory constraints.

This "nasa apologist...er planetary geologist" is a real piece of work.

obfuscation...is his game....NAZI symbols is his name.

Mr. planetary geologist.

Neptune is a gaseous planet.

mars is terrestial.

but you knew that, didn't you.

Titan is an interesting subject as well, eh?

Nothing lives in anything with a pH imbalance you're talking of that'd allow water to briefly survive as a liquidus on the surface of Mars.

is this a "scientist talking"?

SteveR you realize from that original source that the image is obviously horribly misinterpretated and even stated as a cratered terrain.

Looking at those images I'm not sure exactly where they found these supposed lakes, but judging from image size, it appears they've "magnified it quite a lot".

That causes significant problems, because you still don't have resolution. Thus, an area that you can only see 10 foot ball fields per pixel (such as these images) becomes one inch on the screen, and makes whatever really is down there look completely different from whatever it really is.

You can lose a lot of information in 10 foot ball fields.

Moving on to Jaguar...

Are you saying that there's some magical process that produces Methane on terrestrial planets that cannot be the same as that source which formed a gasseous planet out of Methane, that could fit 1,000 Mars' in it?

Ancient volcanism, and the composition of gasses in the solar formation are quite the only needed explanation of Methane on Mars.

Titan is a great example...It has volcanic erruptions of liquid Methane.

How did it get all of its Methane if such is only produced by magmatic volcanism or life as you are trying to claim?

Originally posted by jdjaguar
obfuscation...is his game....NAZI symbols is his name.

Originally posted by Stratrf_Rus
SteveR you realize from that original source that the image is obviously horribly misinterpretated and even stated as a cratered terrain. Looking at those images I'm not sure exactly where they found these supposed lakes, but judging from image size, it appears they've "magnified it quite a lot".

This is only a very small part of the cratered area. I've seen the craters, and this is nothing like them.

I took a look at the part in question with photoshop, and noticed some interesting things. Note the pictures below are not enlarged at all. The first one isn't modified in any way, except to add my arrows.

'A' looks alot like submerged land, that's just close enough to the surface of the lake to be visible.

'B' looks like a very narrow connection to the other two lakes. It's ashame the resolution isn't higher, but it does look like a connection.



Now take a look at the picture below. As you can see, i've increased the contrast to more clearly show the light direction. Everything appears as it should, with the right-side banks of the lake lit up.

The interesting part is that the submerged land (A) does not reflect light, as it would if it was on the surface. But if you look closely, there is a spot of light on the top of it, which suggests that spot is breaking through the water. This ties into what I said earlier, about it being very close to the surface of the water.



Source:www.msss.com...
Load the narrow-angle image, and scroll to the far bottom. The craters they were talking about are on the main wide-angle image.

Note about the resolution: 1 pixel = 11 meters. The top right lake is 50 pixels wide, so 550 meters. Sounds reasonable for a lake.

Ok there's really no discussion about these lakes anymore.

The MOC uses two cameras a "wide angle" and a "narrow angle".

The Narrow Angle is important to this picture because it is what took the image.

The Narrow Angle Spectral Resolution is .50 microns to .90 microns which is effectively in the infrared of the spectrum.

Water in Infrared images are "black" bodies because they absorb infrared wavelengths (hence why they are such good heat sinks for the Earth in terms of absorbing Solar Energy) and since these theorised lakes are no where near "black" the discussion is effectively ended.

Most-likely they are sand-flats or some other plain which has a higher reflectivity in the infrared.

Wikipedia

As you can see, transmittance of infrared by H2O is non-existant from about .55 microns to .85 microns.

I would say I rest my case but I'm sure you're going to try and debate this somehow...I don't mind if you do, just try and be intelligent.

Glad to see this discussion getting more intelligent. You may be right, but I have some thoughts

I agree that a big cool ocean wouldn't radiate heat. Thus it would be dark on your infared imaging. But there is a possibility. The small lakes may actually be volcanic springs.. that would explain their warmth (lightness).

There was some talk about geysers on Mars a while back.

Super link

The last paragraph is important, too.

Originally posted by SteveR
Glad to see this discussion getting more intelligent. You may be right, but I have some thoughts

I agree that a big cool ocean wouldn't radiate heat. Thus it would be dark on your infared imaging. But there is a possibility. The small lakes may actually be volcanic springs.. that would explain their warmth (lightness).

There was some talk about geysers on Mars a while back.

No, that's not the way it works...H2O chemically absorbs near-infrared and infrared...it transmitts various wavelengths intermittently but as a rule of thumb it transmits shorter wavelengths.

It has nothing to do with actual temperature...even the Carribbean Ocean has a "black body" in regards to infrared imagery...

The thematic mapper would be more able to tell you about the "heat" of this area than the simple infrared imagery here (which isn't sensitive enough) but it wouldn't matter..such significant volcanism of a body of water would have merrited much more investigation (we'd probably have sent both rovers there) instead of where we decided to send the rovers.

Originally posted by Stratrf_Rus
I hope you realize the microbes are in stasis and can only theoretically be "revived" if brought back to Earth.

Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad

"I always thought the most significant thing that we ever found on the whole...Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said [anything] about it."

science.nasa.gov...

The 50-100 organisms survived launch, space vacuum, 3 years of radiation exposure, deep-freeze at an average temperature of only 20 degrees above absolute zero, and no nutrient, water or energy source.

How this remarkable feat was accomplished only by Strep. bacteria remains speculative, but it does recall that even our present Earth does not always look as environmentally friendly as it might have 4 billion years ago when bacteria first appeared on this planet.

science.nasa.gov...

The growing list of space-hardiness conditions include:

Vacuum conditions, with bacteria taken down to near zero pressure and temperature, provided suitable care is exercised in the experimental conditions.

Pressure, with viable bacteria after exposure to pressures as high as 10 tonnes per square centimeter (71 tons/sq-in). Colonies of anaerobic bacteria have recently been recovered from depths of 7 km (4.2 mi) or more in the Earth's crust.

Heat. Archaebacteria that can withstand extreme heat have been found thriving in deep-sea hydrothermal vents and in oil reservoirs a mile underground

Radiation, including viable bacteria recovered from the interior of an operating nuclear reactor. In comparison to space, each square meter on Earth is protected by about 10 tons of shielding atmosphere.

Long preservation, including bacteria revived and cultured after some 25 million years of encapsulation in the guts of a resin-trapped bee.

science.nasa.gov...

They are in no way living on the Moon...

Yes, but they did survive for three years in conditions we did not imagine possible. SURVIVAL is thus possible especially when the conditions is ever shifting such as those on Mars. Why imagine that certain forms of life can not simply 'hibernate' for part of any given day/weeks/months while conditions are harsh only to resume activity when needed or conditions make it possible?

I am speculating but you excluding possibilities when scientific history proves that scientist have not often ( or at all stastistically) been right in the long run.

What makes you so confident you will be right this time even when NASA suggest that it's not impossible? You really believe yourself to be THAT well informed?

Stellar

Originally posted by Stratrf_Rus
1) These are ridges, any Geologist can obviously tell this fact. I already stated how.

Thanks but one assumes that the ESA could afford to hire one for consultation thus deciding how to work out the naming schemes.

I want you to look at the areas on the larger version of the image that I have circled in Green (or outlined).

Thanks for proving how far ( by accident/shear ignorance or by design ) you will go to avoid the issue.

These areas show exposed bed-rock or some other kind of rock. They are exposed due to erosion. Erosion that occurs on a ridge, not in a valley.

Well ridges will be eroded by win effects but water is what created most of the valleys we observe on Mars so your only telling us things we don't allready know.

This gives you perspective of what is "up" and what is "down" in elevation. With that perspective you can clearly identify that everything that is even remotely greenish is a "Ridge" not a valley.

With that perspective we can see why it's so hard for you to notice the valley in question.

Is there any arguments!?

No but i do suggest you stop trying so hard to waste our time.

Water to survive on the surface of Mars would need to be extremely brackish...beyond hospitable, probably a negative pH level.

Well if if needed to be brackish to be in liquid form it might very well be if it's exactly like plant life on earth. Do we know that all life follows earth rules exactly?

Martian Atmospheric Pressure does not allow liquid water anywhere.
Namely that Martian Atmospheric Pressure only varies from 6 to 10 hPa.

From your source :

Also, the topography of Mars is more exaggerated than on
Earth, the departures from a mean areoid being a few
kilometers on hemispheric scales [Smith et al., 2001]. For
these reasons, we work with the logarithm of the surface
pressure and remove the annual cycle from the ln ps
timeseries after first computing it as a function of sol-ofyear.
Deviations in ln ps can then be interpreted as
fractional changes in the surface pressure. Since the model
output is bidaily and the annual cycle is subtracted by sol-
of-year, neither the atmospheric tides nor the stationary
waves so prominent in Mars’ atmosphere are manifested in
this analysis.

www.gps.caltech.edu...

From the source i cited earlier:

On Mars the globally-averaged surface pressure of the planet's atmosphere is only slightly less than 6.1 millibars.

"That's the average," says Haberle, "so some places will have pressures that are higher than 6.1 millibars and others will be lower. If we look at sites on Mars where the pressure is a bit higher, that's where water can theoretically exist as a liquid."

science.msfc.nasa.gov...

So i am not sure what to make of it all but i think it's fair to suggest that we do not use the word 'impossible' with the casual self serving ease you just employed.

In fact there seems to be quite a few sources that suggest flowing water in the recent past, which includes yesterday, so let's work with possibility.

WASHINGTON -- Researchers using NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft announced Thursday that they found puzzling signs of water seeping into what appear to be young, freshly-cut gullies and gaps in the Martian surface.
The startling discovery of recently-formed, weeping layers of rock and sediment has planetary experts scratching their heads.

The wet spots show up in more than 120 locations on Mars and in the coldest places on the planet, said Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California, which built the spacecraft's camera.

And that presents a "perplexing problem," he said, because logic says that Mars sub-zero temperatures and thin atmosphere should have kept those wet spots from ever forming.

The wet spots, which turn up in 200 to 250 different images from the Global Surveyor spacecraft, "could be a few million years old but we cannot rule out that some of them are so recent as to have formed yesterday," Malin said.

www.space.com...

Now on the hand of the next few images i would suggest that there is not only flowing water but probably standing water aswell.

qt.exploratorium.edu...

www.msss.com...

www.msss.com...

www.msss.com...

www.msss.com...

I will let you do the zooming and so forth. Plenty of 'black' pools of something if you ask me.

Either way, this is also a good paper that sheds light on possible reasons for the Martian Dust Storms. (Which we still don't know the cause).

Well i guess i will take a wild cause and suggest the dust storms are due to massively differing pressure ranges on a daily basis due to heating and cooling of the air in the huge mountain and valley ranges; but i am no expert so do correct me.

If the ESA thinks that what I have shown to be valleys, then the ESA is retarded.

I think they made it sufficiently clear and that the problem lies with your preconceptions and not their scientist.

But I think the ESA was talking about the actual valleys (which are nothing that I have circled and certainly nothing that is remotely "greenish".
Thus it's an error of the author of this thread that has caused confusion.

They had it right from the start and so did the "author of the thread" even if you refuse to see it for what it probably is.

Stellar