[X] My Assistant

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Mineral discovery explains Mars’ landscape
Queen's University
Friday, October 20, 2006

This refers to the following paper:

Crystal molds on Mars: Melting of a possible new mineral species to create Martian chaotic terrain
Ronald C. Peterson and Ruiyao Wang
Geology, In Press (2006)

For what it's worth, Ron Peterson sent me a preprint of this paper about a month ago; it's fairly interesting.

[CosmicRocker]

That definitely seems possible. I'd suspect that the larger the crater, the more far-reaching the effects might be. For very large impacts, there might even be regional effects that extend well beyond the crater.

Although I never cease to be amazed by the ground truth from the rovers, and the ever better orbital views, the things that I see that seem not to fit into my terrestrial experience are those that most fascinate me. On a planetary scale, the chaotic regions related to the chasms really fascinate me, because I don't really feel confident in previous explanations for them. This recently discovered mineral seems to have properties that could be used to explain some of the things we see.