[X] My Assistant

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Magma and Water on Mars

--- Martian meteorites tell us part of the fascinating story about when volcanoes erupted and water flowed.

Written by G. Jeffrey Taylor
Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology
posted December 27, 2005

[CosmicRocker]

Thanks for that link, Alex. That was fascinating. It never ceases to amaze me what clever isotope geochemists can do with a few samples. Correction, I should say cosmochemists. So, it looks like the core and mantle differentiated very soon after the planet's formation, and water may have been abundant shortly thereafter, with volcanism and continued evidence for water up until relatively recent times. I hope that is a reasonably accurate, albeit very brief summary of the article.

It sure would be nice to circumvent some of the uncertainties of depending on the sampling mechanisms which deliver Martian meterorites to earth, by having sample return missions where we could actually select the rock samples we want to analyse in our labs. I think it will be a long time before we will be able to make such measurements remotely, on the surface of another planet.