Lost world -- what happened to Mars?

You may have heard it before: billions of years ago Mars probably looked more like Earth does now, with clouds and oceans and a much thicker atmosphere. It may even have had some type of microbes. But now it's a barren, frozen desert.

So what happened? Where did the air and water go?

NASA is launching a new spacecraft to try to find out. It's called MAVEN, which stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution. It's the first mission dedicated to studying the red planet's upper atmosphere.

I read long ago a theory that Mars ejected it's core long ago, and the two moons around Mars, and the giant volcano on the surface are the proof. I would say that this latest determination by NASA backs up that theory. I will have to try and find that link, it was pretty fascinating.

It had its atmosphere sucked up and its surface water stolen by aliens that groom the planets every 6000 years.

earth is next after comet ison messes up our magnetosphere and excites the sun's particle emmitions making it easier for the extraction of our own ozone and water supply.

Biigs
It had its atmosphere sucked up and its surface water stolen by aliens that groom the planets every 6000 years.

earth is next after comet ison messes up our magnetosphere and excites the sun's particle emmitions making it easier for the extraction of our own ozone and water supply.

..... say what again???

reply to post by poet1b

I read long ago a theory that Mars ejected it's core long ago, and the two moons around Mars, and the giant volcano on the surface are the proof. I would say that this latest determination by NASA backs up that theory. I will have to try and find that link, it was pretty fascinating.

No, it does not. Mars was simply too small. Its core cooled more rapidly than Earth's because of its size, which meant it lost its magnetic field. Without a magnetosphere to protect it, its atmosphere "boiled away" more rapidly. That, in a nutshell, is the current thinking about Mars. In the meantime, please enjoy this video:

Maybe the Martians used up Mars natural resources, chopped down all of the trees, poisoned the oceans, hunted their animals to extinction, played God & abused nature. However, before Martian man destroyed nature on Mars, she destroyed them all in one massive volcanic explosion. You never know.

Or maybe huge asteroid strikes did it. All the planets have been bombarded. A near planet killer would cause large amounts of material to volatilize, giving the planet a halo of gaseous like atmosphere. Most planets in the solar system are colder than ice. All the gasses hurled into their "atmosphere" would circle the planet or moon, raining back down onto the surface and causing erosive effects like temporary oceans and rivers of methane, ammonia and CO2. Volcanos set off by the cataclysm would add to the temporary atmosphere.

Once the heat dissipated, all the volatile gasses would refreeze, and settle back into permafrost, leaving the whole planet looking like it was once "habitable".

Then scientists could use that "once upon a earth" story to make claims of fossil life and justify ever more money for probes to go and find it.

Personally I don't think thats what they're really looking for, but thats another story.

reply to post by DJW001


I have seen this theory put forth before.

My question is, is it supported mathematically?

Mons Olympus and Valles Marineris, to me, are signs that whatever happened to it was rather cataclysmic. Add to that the rocks strewen around like half the planet was blown apart, combined with the blueberries which are often accreted, and it just makes the "core cooled off" explanation seem silly.

RE: the op....the moons do not have the right composition to be a core ejection (which would be a pretty unusual thing to have happen). But their degrading orbits do indicate that they are relatively recent arrivals.

reply to post by bigfatfurrytexan

My question is, is it supported mathematically?

Yes. Here's a primer:

www.geol.umd.edu...

Mons Olympus and Valles Marineris, to me, are signs that whatever happened to it was rather cataclysmic. Add to that the rocks strewen around like half the planet was blown apart, combined with the blueberries which are often accreted, and it just makes the "core cooled off" explanation seem silly

Mars has significantly lower gravity than Earth, which allows volcanic ejecta to travel higher and further. The "cooling core" theory is just that, a theory, but it is the most widely accepted model.

lostbook
Maybe the Martians used up Mars natural resources, chopped down all of the trees, poisoned the oceans, hunted their animals to extinction, played God & abused nature.

That sounds oddly familiar...

One day soon, we will realize that beings much like us might have been the cause of the destruction of Mars, and then stop it before it happens to Earth...

reply to post by poet1b


Mars was probably earth like in its chemical composition as you say but though almost dead its core still produces a very weak electromagetosphere, not enough to prevent the radiation exposure but still just detectable, now back then it's core was probably a lot hotter and able to produce a stronger magnetosphere, there are two possabilltys as far as the asteroids phobos and deimos are concerned as there orbits are not natural,

files.abovetopsecret.com...
This is phobos or part of phobos in close up, note the linear cratering on the surface, almost as though it was shaped and the small craters may have been were mass drivers mined the surface to move it out of the asteroid belt and control its tragectory (that or they are stratafication and phobos is a chunk of planetary crust but either way from the asteroid belt and not mars so another now no longer extant planet on which those geological activitys too place).
One possabillity is that the asteroids were places there as part of a terraforming operation long ago and the other is that, phobos seems to be hollow by its size and composition as opposed to its orbit which is too low and slow unless it is hollow, there are irregularitys with deimos orbit as well and both are in near concentric orbits as opposed to the irregular egg shaped orbit you would expect from a naturally captured asteroid.
Billions of years ago though there is another conteder that most people miss, the sun was cooler when it was younger and the planet Venus was slightly further away and inside the goldilocks zone around the star, it has two major continental highlands, ocean basins, techtonic plates like earth, is almost identical in size to earth but its oceans boiled into the atmosphere long ago and it rains all the time - sulphuric acid that never reaches the ground, the surface has an pressure like our deepest oceans and a surface temperature of over 400 degrees but cool it down and the evaporated compounds in its atmosphere would condense and some solidify so that at the earths temperature you would be hard pressed to tell the difference with the earth.
In the early solar system it may have been an even better candidate than mars for a sentient race to have evolved on before they escaped and terraformed mars and settled the dangerous pathogen infested biosphere of earth.

reply to post by DJW001

The "cooling core" theory is just that, a theory, but it is the most widely accepted model.

The "cooling core" theory is silly because do not take in charge the Phobos and Deimos existence....


Mars was in the Habitable Zone ... before the cometary impact, that hit Mars right to the opposite extremity of the great Tharsis Volcanoes Region. The impact it created the volcanoes and it threw outside material in the space that formed Phobos and Deimos.

But this is only my theory.

Oops, I forgot to post the link to the story, from which the title comes.

www.cnn.com...

reply to post by DJW001


Wrong approach, learn to follow the scientific method padawan.

The boiling off theory is but one of many. The problem with the boiling off theory is that it means the heat of the core and magnetism must then be proven to be a major component of gravity, and that has yet to be established. If Mar's didn't have the mass to create a thick atmosphere similar to Earth's, then how did it ever have such an atmosphere?

Until far more is known, it is a good idea to keep ones mind open to the many possibilities.

reply to post by LABTECH767


Nice way to think outside of the box.

There are theories that the orbits of the planets have drifted considerably for various reason, and there is evidence that this might have been possible.

reply to post by LABTECH767

Thanks for that intriguing picture of Phobos. I don't know about mass drivers from Mining doing that, though. To my eye I see tumbling boulders bouncing in slow motion around and around in a low gravity field. That must have been some impact.

This isn't the link I was looking for, but it does produce some interesting theories.

www.firmament-chaos.com...

Six thousand years ago, the solar system comprised only two terrestrial planets. A high energy (10^41 ergs) impact on Jupiter at that time initiated a 3000 year period of planetary chaos. A plasma cloud many times the size of Jupiter rebounded and rapidly contracted into the flaming proto-Venus. This new planet swept through the inner solar system and ejected what I call priori-Mars, the most ancient of the terrestrial planets, from its interior orbit into one that intersected that of the Earth. Priori-Mars had a solid iron core which was the source of its internal magnetic field and was a living planet with abundant vegetable and animal life, including intelligent life far beyond our own. Priori-Mars (as Yama-Yami in Hindu myth) was described as a 'green man with a red cloak,' indicating that it was covered with vegetation. This, combined with the duality inherent in this name and in the Chinese Yin-Yang figure, were all depictions of the two dichotomous regions of priori-Mars - the still vegetated southern hemisphere and the north polar region, which was covered with volcanos and lava. These correspond today with the southern highlands and the northern plains. Yama was said to have been protected by two vicious dogs, which were obviously its diminutive satellites, Phobos and Diemos.

This is theorized to have happened only round 6,000 years ago, which would have put on an amazing display in the sky, which early stories from the era hint at. This theory is a bit far fetched, but does point to some interesting evidence.

Here is what appears to be a legitimate source with some facts on Mars.

ase.tufts.edu...

Like the Earth, the planet Mars has an atmosphere, white clouds, polar caps and seasons.

Mars has a partially liquid core, probably containing molten iron and perhaps surrounding a solid iron core, as within the Earth.

Mars does not now have a global, dipolar magnetic field to deflect lethal cosmic rays and energetic solar particles.

The oldest terrain on Mars exhibits bands of magnetized material with alternating polarity, most likely originating about 4 billion years ago when the red planet might have had a global, dipolar magnetic field.
...
Layers in the polar caps of Mars suggest climate changes on time scales of 10 thousand to 100 thousand years, perhaps triggered by periodic variations in the planet’s orbit and rotation axis.

Mars is divided into two strikingly different hemispheres; in the south there are the older, elevated, heavily cratered highlands that resemble the lunar highlands. In the north there are the younger, lower-lying, smoother volcanic plains.

Towering volcanoes and immense canyons are found on Mars.

The one great volcano is several times the height of mount Everest. Why would a planet so much smaller than Earth have the largest volcano in the solar system?

This link is fairly heavy with information. There is a lot of information to take in, but the gist of the info comes down to this.

www.pnas.org...

Our limited knowledge of the interior of Mars owes in part to a singular event that brought a new purpose to a floundering Mars research and exploration program. With Mars Pathfinder en route, the focus shifted from a frozen, dormant, volcanic planet to a potentially hydrologically active planet that may, at some point, have harbored life. This shift in emphasis resulted from the recognition of the carbonate-bearing, orthopyroxenite Allan Hills (ALH) 84001 (Fig. 3) as martian in 1994 (32) and subsequent suggestion in 1996 that it harbored evidence of ancient microbial life. This suggestion engaged and captured the public attention about planetary science in a way not seen since Apollo. Fifteen years later, carbonates, sulfates, water-ice, and other water-borne deposits have been discovered on the planet’s surface, redefining the hydrologic and geologic history of Mars.

Mar's exploration are creating a whole new picture of the red planet. What I see is some major event that drastically changed Mars at some time in the past.

We left.

reply to post by Biigs


Is this like the basis of Scientology?

There is another thread somewhere around that claims Mars was colonized by advanced aliens, and then destroyed in a war between rivaling fractions of some interstellar empire.

Then Earth was colonized, but first the planets energy levels had to be stabilized, so the pyramids were built.

Then Apes were genetically changed to provide labor for the aliens who were colonizing Earth.

In the Theater of the Absurd, anything is possible.