The ancient tsunami on Mars
Let’s forget politics for a moment.
Mars’ big, salty northern ocean likely formed about 3.4 billion years ago. The ocean’s existence is widely accepted by Mars researchers, Rodriguez said, but there is considerable debate about its nature.
For example, some scientists believe the ocean was relatively long-lived, if quite cold. But others don’t think the ancient Martian climate could have supported stable bodies of surface water for long, and therefore argue that the ocean froze over very quickly — perhaps in a few thousand years or less.
The new study, which was published in late June in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, bolsters the former viewpoint.
Rodriguez and his colleagues, led by François Costard of the French National Center for Scientific Research, built upon several years of previous research into the ocean and its imprints on the landscape of ancient Mars.
For example, Rodriguez led a 2016 study that identified huge lobes in the northern plains — features that strongly resemble marks left by tsunamis here on Earth. The team determined that the lobes were carved out by two different mega-tsunamis, which flooded the region more than 3 billion years ago.
Mars does not have significant plate-tectonic activity, so the big waves were probably unleashed by impacts. So, Costard, Rodriguez and their colleagues hunted for craters left behind by the cosmic culprits, narrowing the search over the next few years.
That search may now be over, at least for one of the two impactors. Multiple lines of evidence point to Lomonosov, the scientists report in the new study. For example, Lomonosov is in the right place, it’s the right age (as determined by crater counts), and it looks a lot like marine craters here on Earth.
Lomonosov fits the bill in other ways as well. For instance, the crater is about as deep as scientists think the shallow northern ocean was at the time of impact.
Come now. If there really are dried up seas on Mars we’d be seeing some beached sailboats. But we do not.
Fascinating.
Earth’s thermosphere is cooling. Turns out (surprise!) solar activity or inactivity has a dramatic effect on Earth’s climate. Who knew?
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/coolingthermosphere.html
John Carter, where are you?
Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics since it’s core is supposed to be solid. That doesn’t mean it never had plate tectonics. Even so, an “ordinary Mars-quake” would not create a mega tsunami. Though a giant landslide from a coastal mountain or cliff would. Or a meteor impact. Cool stuff.
Speaking of oceans on other heavenly bodies, I saw an old Nova (I think) about our Cassini space probe that traveled to Saturn. Lots of cool stuff, but I thought the info. on the moon Enceladus was really amazing. Here is a bit from Wikipedia on what they learned.
Sorry for the length. The kicker at the end is the implication that there may be microbial life.
Meteorites have been found on Earth that came from Mars — i.e. ejecta from very large impacts that achieved Mars escape velocity, went into eccentric orbit around the Sun that intersected Earth orbit.
Thus there is the possibility that Mars shared any early life that evolved there with Earth.
Mars cooled faster than Earth after formation of the solar system. Mars core became solid, thus it lost its magnetic field. That field shielded its atmosphere from the solar wind. Over millions of years the solar wind removed the Martian atmosphere (and water vapor), leading to the desert Mars we see today with a very thin atmosphere whose chemical composition indicates what its early atmosphere was.
Life on Earth just might have originated on Mars. If we find subterranean life (bacteria) near the poles that have similar DNA (and are right-handed), that would be a strong indication that the link exists.
It was a Nova on Netflix called “Death Dive to Saturn.” The title refers to Cassini’s final series of descending orbits around Saturn, plunging deeper and deeper into its upper atmosphere, where it was ultimately captured and crashed. Intentionally.
No beauty, calm, and couth
Along the Grand Canal.
Disappointing, I’ll tell you.
According to Bezos and Musk we need to move to Mars because Earth is going to be ruined due to global warming. Question: Will Amazon deliver to Mars?
According to Bezos and Musk we need to move to Mars because Earth is going to be ruined due to global warming. Question: Will Amazon deliver to Mars?
Cornhead: This was actually the plot to a 1977 British television show, “Alternative 3,” which succeeded at presenting a hoax like Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast and was taken seriously by many viewers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3
Mars has the biggest known volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons. It dwarfs Mount Everest. It also has a canyon that would swallow the Grand Canyon. As for a meteor from Mars, count me among those who roll their eyes when someone states with certainty a particular rock came from Mars. Its extrapolation to the nth degree speculation at best. There has never even been a SINGLE sample return mission from Mars, only a few probes have landed and maybe some spectral analysis has been done from space, not to mention that many of the same minerals may even be found on Mars as on Earth. There is science and there is a type of faith that calls itself “ science”.
J.B.: Martian meteorites sound reasonable to me.
Mars gets hit by meteors, some of them are large enough to blast chunks of Martian rock into space, some of those get captured by Earth’s gravity and are large enough not to be incinerated by our atmosphere and reach Earth’s surface. Scientists analyze these meteors and find chemical signature which match the data from the Viking Landers and are hard to explain otherwise, if not from Mars.
Perhaps the scientists got it wrong, but quite a lot of astronomy is necessarily indirect.
My favorite current theory is that the Mars-sized planet, called Theia, which 4.4 billion years ago collided with the Earth and caused the formation of the Moon, was a world covered with water and that’s where our oceans come from.
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/how-did-earth-get-its-water-scientists-think-they-ve-ncna1011441
I love thinking about this stuff, including the ancient Martian tsunami.
J.B.
Check out this URL
https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/snc/
So what happened to that ocean on Mars??
While meteorite impacts sound more exciting, clearly it was all that CO2 tossed in the Martian atmosphere by SUVs, coal fired plants, diesel engines, deforestation and other non-natural sources of CO2.
All this CO2 eventually burned off the Martian atmosphere and turned it into a lifeless rock.
I think I’d heard that most of the little bit of gas still constituting the Martian atmosphere is CO2 JohnTyler, as it happens. On account of its relatively heavy, etc.
Talking about mega-tsunami there is similar story about the volcano on Canary Islands.
https://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2013/12/13/canary-islands-tsunami/
Although the above article discounts this there is a theory that this has already happened once. See https://phys.org/news/2017-10-theory-giant-boulders-atop-cliff.html
Science results stuff from Curiosity Rover.
Mars is just one planet among a vast solar system among a vast Galaxy among a vast Universe. To say with certainty a rock that fell from the sky is from Mars is just the height of arrogance. Those rocks could have come from the main astroid belt, or the Kuiper belt – even one of the Dwarf Planets in the Kuiper belt – or even one of the vast numbers of Trans-Neptunian objects that do not q
quiet rise to the occasion of “dwarf planet” or the Oort cloud or one of the many still largely unexplored moons of the gas giants or one of their trojan asteroids or maybe just a rock from interstellar space that passed into the Solar System.
Let the science speak to that: NASA Rover Confirms Mars Origin of Some Meteorites
https://mars.nasa.gov/news/1525/nasa-rover-confirms-mars-origin-of-some-meteorites/
Certainty? So then what is the Argon 36 to Argon 38 ratio in the more than 600 numbered trans – Neptunian objects and when were these measurements made? And the more than 4000 exo planets confirmed so far? Whats the ratios from rocks blasted off of those planets or their moons since most of these are giants? And the likely, but not
certain, large numbers of smaller terrestrial exo solar planets that have remained undetected even if their gas giant neighbors have been. And when were these measurements made?
Would not those two isotopes of argon have slightly different boiling points? Would that not imply that during entry into Earths atmosphere the ratios may have been altered ?
jon baker:
The method for analysis of Ar36/Ar38 in meteorite samples relies on gas bubbles trapped inside mineral grains (the grains must be intact). Quote from the article cited by sdferr
” …. gas bubbles trapped inside Martian meteorites …” If you choose a garbage sample to analyze you get worthless data, so they are careful about that kind of problem.
Something crashed into Jupiter a day ago and the flash of the impact was about the diameter of the earth. Doesn’t mean the falling object was that big, but the energy released was substantial. See the picture, captured by a backyard astronomer, here: https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/jupiter-just-got-slammed-by-something-so-big-we-saw-it-from-earth/?__twitter_impression=true