Marsisimportant: "The simplest explanation is something similar to what I conjectured in my previous post."

Phil: "That's odd - I would have said exactly the same, but about MY previous post"

Yes, the simplest explanation is that they were thrown there as ejecta from the many small craters like Dolphin that occur all over the region. I agree that ice is possible, but it requires a change in the current environment. Ejecta doesn't. In fact, even if there were blueberries on the rock left from its icy past (if it had one), they should now be joined by ejecta-deposited blueberries.

Phil

Besides ejecta and ice, what about the possibility that BI was buried, through deposition, in the rock (not ice) layers in which the berries later formed and berries were left on it just as they were left on the rest of the Meridiani surface as the layers eroded away? And also, the possibility that BI impacted in and buried itself in berry-containing material which was later eroded away.

Yep, the simplest and most logical explanation.

Looks like a Widmanstätten pattern to me!

Fascinating...
John

tfisher, thanks for the link to the Lunar and Planetary Science article. It raises the possibility in my mind that Heat Shield and Block Island are part of one and the same fall . . .

Rather than BI being encased in the rock, couldn't it have been slowly buried by migrating ripples at a time when Meridiani had thicker drift deposits than are currently there today?

Fast-forward to today and the really fine-grained material has blown away leaving much smaller ripples (and Block Island) with a surface cover of blueberries.

I think all of these mechanisms are possible. Deciding between them will be the hard part.

Phil

Who knows?

BI could have been covered by migrating ripples that moved on or covered by ripples that were in turn covered and eventually hardened into rock, later to be eroded away.

If BI is REALLY old, it may have lived through a combination of the possibilities being discussed here.

Maybe OT but I wanted to show you an inspiration that make me the scenery just arround BI. I love to incrust 3D letters in realistic way, like the Panic Room intro sequence .


Thanks for the correction Nprev

Another piece added to the MI mosaic...

Stu, Clearly triangleform writing of the Widmanstatten variety. Giger is a visionary.

Ah, OK! You were referring to the Niles-Michalski "icy test tubes model". I suspected as much, but had to allow that there might be some recent publication I hadn't seen yet that actually related blueberry formation with ice. Unlike the Niles-Michalski paper.
We did discuss this previously in the "Meridiani Ice theory" thread. There Paul Niles himself assured us that their model did not account for blueberry formation, but was concerned with the formation of the characteristic sulfate deposits of the Meridiani bedrock prior to the diagenesis of concretions. Niles conceded that the MER team's original scenario of blueberries concreting at regularly-spaced intervals within the deposited sulfate sandstones (after the icy phase) fit with the observations. That scenario does not predict concretions forming in closely-packed layers such as we see on Block Island. Such aggregations would only occur by advection of the blueberries after formation.

A colorized mosaic of the MI based on the top view of BI :

Ant, VERY cool marker for BI; I'm sure that the MER Memorial Park Authority will emplace something just like that in a few hundred years...

One correction, and definitely not a criticism: The word is spelled "block", defined roughly as a solid, often massive piece of material in this context. "Bloc" is also an English word usually meaning a political or social coalition.

Again, no criticism implied; I know that English often sucks like this!

Any of the rockhounds have an explanation for the small gray patches? Are they due to the surface layer being worn off or are they due to variations in composition?