Liquid Water on Mars

Rand Simberg wrote:


"Liquid CO2"? On Mars? Do they know the atmospheric (non)pressure
there?

"Others claim" that we didn't go to the moon.



Stand at the polar caps come spring and it's going to be like getting
zapped by a Dalek big time:
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/200...with_carbo.php
In the article, they talk about pressurized gas forming under the dry
ice then erupting...but if what's down there isn't pressurized gas, but
liquid CO2, then all sorts of neat things can occur when it's exposed to
ambient Martian atmospheric pressure.

Pat

Rand Simberg wrote:

D'oh!

I see on rereading that it's not on the surface...



Jets of liquid CO2 blasting into a gaseous form as it comes into
contact with the surface from subsurface deposits would explain a lot of
oddities on Mars.

Pat

Gareth Slee wrote:
Water has flowed on Mars in the last 7 years...
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/main/index.html

Even if so, it's not exactly common. In the same amount of time they
found 2 possible surface water flows, and 20 meteor craters. Anything
that's 10 times as rare as meteor craters is not something you can
count as a significant resource. Unless, of course, there's lots of
underground water, and only the escape part is rare, or all the water
is frozen, and only the liquid part is rare. In either case there
would not be lots of sites for life as we know it....

Lou Scheffer

On Thu, 07 Dec 2006 01:10:17 GMT, h (Rand
Simberg) wrote:

Liquid CO2 does not exist on the surface of Mars.

....Damn. There goes Perrier's next marketing gimmic.

OM
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Jonathan Silverlight wrote:


Isn't one argument that the CO2 is under pressure because it's under a
considerable depth of rock? http://unisci.com/stories/20012/0402013.htm
Only something like spectral analysis of one of these outflows will
decide what's happening.


Yeah, that will definitely solve it- if it's CO2 ice, then we know that
a lot of the same part water plays on Earth is being done by subsurface
liquid CO2 on Mars. If on the other hand it turns out to be water ice...
then we've got to do some major rethinking on how Mars works, starting
with where the heat is coming from to keep the water liquid.
Although it's a completely off-the-wall hypothesis, life that developed
in liquid water might be able to create a way to keep water liquid at
very cold temperatures by the evolution of something like a biological
antifreeze solution.
Such life, living in superchilled subsurface streams and water pockets,
could escape the hard radiation that bombards the surface of the planet,
and feed directly off minerals in the soil.
So, what do I think the likelihood of that being the case is?
Oh, around 1 in 1000 at best. :-D
I think they'll find this is CO2 in action.

Pat

Rand Simberg wrote:




Carbon dioxide - we know it exists in a gaseous state on Mars (it's most
of the atmosphere) in a solid form (the polar caps), and as we recently
found out, erupts in geysers at the polar regions as they warm in spring.
So if something's rolling down crater walls, its very probably liquid
CO2, not water.



No. Liquid CO2 does not exist on the surface of Mars.



Not in a stable form, but how about if a stream of it from a subsurface
pocket under pressure broke through the side of the crater and flowed
down it before vaporizing off into gas and freezing into dry ice?
The thing is, we keep speculating on liquid water without any means to
get the temperature in the soil high enough to keep it liquid. With all
of the speculation about this, the place should look like Yellowstone
National Park in the infrared spectrum, with volcanic activity keeping
things above freezing wherever you see these sorts of effects.
But we don't find active volcanos, and we don't find earthquakes. And we
haven't found a magnetic field either, which suggests this planet is
solid all the way through. And I'm having a hard time figuring out how
you get volcanic activity near the surface on a planet that doesn't have
a molten core.
If it had a major moon close in to it you could make some sort of an
argument for heating via tidal stress, but Phobos and Deimos aren't
going to do that by any stretch of the imagination.
Occam's razor is pointing toward CO2 being involved here. The planet has
CO2 all over the place.
Every time something seems to show that liquid water or ice doesn't
exist in large quantities now, and may never have existed in large
quantities in the past on Mars, a new hypothetical process is introduced
to allow it to exist _despite_ the evidence.
This isn't how science works, this is how religion works.
We see the dry surface.... okay there's loads of water ice frozen just
underground, as those drainage channels show.
We find out that liquid CO2 could cut those channels...okay, but what
about those blueberries?
The blueberries turn out to be meteorite splash.
We don't find any magnetic field or volcanic activity....okay, the core
is molten, but it's undergoing a magnetic pole flip, so the field is now
neutral.
And one unlikely thing gets piled on top of another unlikely thing to
try and shore up the watery Mars theory.
Because we want water to be there, just like we want God to be there.
I think what we are going to find is a planet where most of what occurs
on Earth with H2O occurs on Mars with CO2.
So we might want to figure out life forms that live in, and are
basically composed of, liquid CO2 if we have hopes of life up there.

Pat

wrote:



Even if so, it's not exactly common. In the same amount of time they
found 2 possible surface water flows, and 20 meteor craters. Anything
that's 10 times as rare as meteor craters is not something you can
count as a significant resource. Unless, of course, there's lots of
underground water, and only the escape part is rare, or all the water
is frozen, and only the liquid part is rare. In either case there
would not be lots of sites for life as we know it....



One idea for getting subsurface water ice to melt and flow without
volcanic activity is meteor impacts.
Are these "water" flows they've photographed associated with meteor
impacts in the same place and time frame?

Pat

On Wed, 06 Dec 2006 18:16:15 -0800, LouScheffer wrote:


Gareth Slee wrote:
Water has flowed on Mars in the last 7 years...
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/main/index.html

Even if so, it's not exactly common. In the same amount of time they
found 2 possible surface water flows, and 20 meteor craters. Anything
that's 10 times as rare as meteor craters is not something you can
count as a significant resource. Unless, of course, there's lots of
underground water, and only the escape part is rare, or all the water
is frozen, and only the liquid part is rare. In either case there
would not be lots of sites for life as we know it....

Lou Scheffer

Depends on how deep in the crust water goes, how deep fractures in the
crust go, and how warm the interior is. So what we need now is a permanent
network of seismometers on Mars, and a series of deep (as in oil-well deep)
drillshafts to drop instruments down. Plus a GPS system for Mars. And
another one for Venus.

You know, if I was going to be born late enough to have a snowballs chance
of seeing all this, I'd have missed seeing Apollo live on TV.

mutter mutter mutter

Pat Flannery wrote:


One idea for getting subsurface water ice to melt and flow without
volcanic activity is meteor impacts.
Are these "water" flows they've photographed associated with meteor
impacts in the same place and time frame?


Another interesting thing here... according to this:
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0612/06mgs/
.....the "water" flows are generally located above 30 degrees latitude.
So in other words, the further from the Martian equator you get, and the
colder it gets, the more likely liquid water becomes.
Does that sound odd?
Temperature at the equator in summer hits +20 C; so if you were looking
for liquid water flows, that would be where to look.
But here the areas that show the flows are below the freezing point of
water all the time.
Even if the water has so much CO2 in it that it lowers its freezing
point, that's not going to be enough to help.
But if we can get enough pressure on top of dry ice via soil deposits
that it can't go straight from a solid to gaseous form, then liquid CO2
can be fairly stable over quite a temperature range:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
....anything above -57 C (which is its freezing point), which is why we
have room temperature CO2 cartridges and fire extinguishers.
And considering the the temperature of the surface of Mars varies
between +20 C at the equator on noonday equinox and -140 C at the poles
in winter night, with a mean temperature of -63 C, and you can see that
it just in the right range for having liquid CO2 form at around the
mid-latitudes during summer with the proviso that there is some pressure
on it.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:



Pat Flannery wrote:


One idea for getting subsurface water ice to melt and flow without
volcanic activity is meteor impacts.
Are these "water" flows they've photographed associated with meteor
impacts in the same place and time frame?



Another interesting thing here... according to this:
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0612/06mgs/
....the "water" flows are generally located above 30 degrees latitude.
So in other words, the further from the Martian equator you get, and
the colder it gets, the more likely liquid water becomes.
Does that sound odd?
Temperature at the equator in summer hits +20 C; so if you were
looking for liquid water flows, that would be where to look.
But here the areas that show the flows are below the freezing point of
water all the time.
Even if the water has so much CO2 in it that it lowers its freezing
point, that's not going to be enough to help.
But if we can get enough pressure on top of dry ice via soil deposits
that it can't go straight from a solid to gaseous form, then liquid
CO2 can be fairly stable over quite a temperature range:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
...anything above -57 C (which is its freezing point), which is why we
have room temperature CO2 cartridges and fire extinguishers.
And considering the the temperature of the surface of Mars varies
between +20 C at the equator on noonday equinox and -140 C at the
poles in winter night, with a mean temperature of -63 C, and you can
see that it just in the right range for having liquid CO2 form at
around the mid-latitudes during summer with the proviso that there is
some pressure on it.



I knew the NASA PAO had a hand in the "water" discovery, because back in
2000 NASA had said they'd found the same thing, and then this came out:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-...ence-00k2.html
Then this: http://unisci.com/stories/20012/0402013.htm
And then this: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-...ence-00k2.html
What they are seeing is eruptions of subsurface liquid CO2, not flows of
water.
If they do spectral analysis of those flows, they'll find out they are
made of dry ice, not water ice, and they'll vanish as soon as the
temperature of the ground they are on goes above around -50 C. If they
are water ice, they'll hang around till the temp goes well above that.

Pat