Earthlike Mars? |
Earthlike Mars? |
Apr 1 2009, 02:28 AM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 233 Joined: 21-April 05 Member No.: 328 |
All, I know this isn't the right place for this post, but I've looked around and can't find an appropriate, current UMSF forum (Doug, perhaps you could give me some guidance on establishing such) -- so here goes: I think a [the] new paradigm for Martian geology is rapidly coalescing, namely, that Mars is very much like the Earth in terms of the preponderance of water -- except that it is all frozen, and covered under a thin layer of dust/regolith! See, for example, this article:
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/41995902.html Hence the "seepages" found in crater walls; hence the evidence of catastophic flooding -- the result of volcanism melting huge pockets of ice. And I am going to add my own wrinkle (probably not original): that the differentiation of Mars into a rougher southern hemisphere and smoother northern hemsphere represents something like Earth's Pangea stage, ie, the northern hemisphere is a vast frozen sea covered with a thin layer of ice. |
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Aug 26 2012, 05:07 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 112 Joined: 20-August 12 From: Spain Member No.: 6597 |
Hi again,
I perfectly understand what Emily and Doug want to say, and they are completely right. Of course there is a difference between tectonics and plate tectonics. But, why did I choose this image instead of using one of the thousand pictures of faults in Mars as a point to plate tectonics? Because it's inside the Valles Marineris system, and if we accept the idea that Valles Marineris is a martian rift system we can say that is a divergent margin between two plates. Of course, I'm not saying that there is a plate tectonics like the one we have in Earth (we don't see, for example, a bimodal height distribution between continental crust and other kind of crust, except the difference of Northern highlands and Sourthern highlands), but accepting the idea of the rift system I think it's necessary to accept the presence of convective motion under the crust to create a rift system. But, as everything in Mars, we need more data to create a better picture of it's crustal structure and thermal evolution. Maybe Mars lost a very important quantity of heat through vulcanism at a very high rate and wasn't able to develop a plate tectonics like the one we are used to. |
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