Mars MOLA Sea Confirmed!

Robert Clark wrote:
On Jun 15, 11:05 pm, kT wrote:
tom Donnley wrote:
On Jun 15, 6:27 am, kT wrote:
Take that you carbon dioxide lovers!
http://webpages.charter.net/tsiolkovsky/
Huh..I dont get it. It's a list of what appear to be PDF's. Is their
something specific your refering to??
Nothing specific. Just the usual mars, water, life and fossil stuff.

Banded iron formations. Extremophile stromatolites, blobs, blobula,
bloblulons, the usual suspects. We were seeing a lot of it laying around
up on Husband Hill, and it appears there was quite a bit of it laying
around the Sojourner site as well :

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...n_segment1.gif

Actually a recent paper does provide further support that Mars did
have a global ocean early in its geological history:

New CU-Boulder Study Indicates an Ancient Ocean May Have Covered One-
Third of Mars.
June 13, 2010
"A vast ocean likely covered one-third of the surface of Mars some 3.5
billion years ago, according to a new study conducted by University of
Colorado at Boulder scientists."
...
"A second study headed by Hynek and involving CU-Boulder researcher
Michael Beach of LASP and CU-Boulder doctoral student Monica Hoke
being published in the Journal of Geophysical Research–Planets --
which is a publication of the American Geophysical Union -- detected
roughly 40,000 river valleys on Mars. That is about four times the
number of river valleys that have previously been identified by
scientists, said Hynek.
The river valleys were the source of the sediment that was carried
downstream and dumped into the deltas adjacent to the proposed ocean,
said Hynek. "The abundance of these river valleys required a
significant amount of precipitation," he said. "This effectively puts
a nail in the coffin regarding the presence of past rainfall on Mars."
Hynek said an ocean was likely required for the sustained
precipitation.
"Collectively, these results support the existing theories regarding
the extent and formation time of an ancient ocean on Mars and imply
the surface conditions during the time probably allowed the occurrence
of a global and active hydrosphere integrating valley networks, deltas
and a vast ocean as major components of an Earth-like hydrologic
cycle," Di Achille and Hynek wrote in Nature Geoscience."
http://www.colorado.edu/news/r/f9b2e...0735f7098.html

It gets even better :

http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2010/06/mars

So what we have is a vast mud ball with a great polar sea for a billion
years or so of rainfall, and then the slow acidification and complete
reprocessing of that ocean into great global glaciations and ice sheets,
eventually depositing any remains into the polar ice caps, subsurface
above and below 60 degrees north and south latitude, and these remnant
glaciers in the mid latitudes, protected by sediments and regolith and
slowly sublimating, chemically eroding away, ground down by light wind.

Mr. Squyres really dropped the ball there up in those Columbia Hills,
the best chance they have now is to try and hump Oppy across the 10
kilometers or so of parking lot and get to the base of those cliffs.