Hard Evidence Of Liquid Water On Mars Today
Pictures of active geyser vents and wet soil
Now for a look at the rocks that cover water sources. Some reveal that they have slots or geysers at their edges, and when that water erupts, it leaves wash areas and slots in the ground.
| Opportunity,
Sol 096 revealed a lot of details at the rim of Endurance
Crater. This is one such image that shows very clearly that
something has removed the soil from beneath the edge of this rock.
You can see the wash areas leading from it toward the top of the image.
This slab of stone shows that water has been expelled from its perimeter and left a deep "mudhole" on the right lower edge. The lighter material leading away toward the top of the image shows how the material has been washed away. All the fossil spherules in the immediate vicinity have been coated with mud, turning them red-orange. Click the image for a full-sized view of this vent. |
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| This is the close-up view
of the vent itself. Look at the bottom edge of the rock slab.
See how the material cannot possible be removed by wind? Wind would
have eroded the area uniformly, and not directly into a slot.
This shows a rounded, washed-out area, not a wind-eroded slot. |
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| More importantly, wind
will not coat some of the fossils with dust and scour their neighbors
clean. It is not selective enough to do so. Only water can
both coat some and clean others in a narrow zone, based on the aim of the
spray and the mud it can wash away.
Now, look above the rock at the lighter soil- it shows darker cracks in it. What you are seeing is drying mud. As it dries, the color lightens and the cracks form. The cracks are still damp and they are darker than the surrounding mud. This is exactly the behavior of drying mud that you see anywhere on Earth. Not only that, but beneath each fossil on the top of the rock slab, you can see the darker area where water is still present as dampness. It has yet to dry and lighten to match the surrounding rock face. So water periodically erupts from beneath this rock slab and then washes down into Endurance Crater. In fact, this entire area (and many others seen in previous sols) is riddled with channels and geysers where underground water sprays out and soaks the area regularly. Meridiani Planum literally has water gushing out from the ground. |
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| The result of all this
water flow is that huge areas of the planum are muddy and boggy for some
periods of time. Have a look at this muddy area from Sol
103, where the ground is clearly dark and wet, and shows the same
signs of water runoff that you would expect.
The ground is dark, the crater (at top) shows clear signs of water runoff, and the mud has fairly coated everything in a layer of pink-brown. Click the image for a large picture. So there are no real surprises here- Mars turns out to be sopping wet in some areas, and we were fortunate enough to have this spacecraft land in one of those areas. So what happens to all this water if enough of it emerges at once? And more importantly, is there enough water to be significant to, say, human exploration? After all, the single most important factor in where human beings can live is the availability of water. |
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When Endurance Crater was formed, the impact fractured the bedrock deeply and broke open the aquifer. The resulting flow of water entered the crater and froze into a huge block of dirty ice. Periodically, the aquifer flows again, and the water freezes and leaves its ice everywhere. You can see that ice and the frozen flow lines from the aquifer here.
| The original image for
this is from Opportunity,
Sol 101. It shows a large, smoothly curved thing at the bottom
of Endurance Crater. Note that the sand around it is smooth and
shows no ripples. This object, however, shows fixed waves that do
not move.
Images taken over the course of hours and of days reveal that the object does not change at all, even though the sand is being blown into dunes all around the crater. A close look at the lower edge of this object shows that it has a shadow edge that is sharp and distinct from the dark, surrounding sand. And, when you look at some of the peaks of this object, you can see what appears to be light shining through it. That is exactly what it is. This object is a large block of ice that has frozen from ground water and the minerals and salts in the soil. Let's look at the ice in more detail now. Click here for an anaglyph view of the ice block. |
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This is an assembled view from Sol 096 showing the entire ice floe at the bottom of the crater. Sharp eyed people will notice that the ice floe has exactly the same shape as the ice in the image above, from Sol 101. Five days have passed, winds have blown, dunes and sand have moved, but this thing remains exactly unchanged. It is a solid mass, not a collection of particles. Click the image for a large image map. NOTE: 450kb, long download!
But also notice to the right that there are long lines of something leading into the mass- these are the frozen flow of water from the aquifer down the crater and into the ice block.
| This is the close-up view
of those flow lines. You can make out the sharp shadows and the fact
that they have hard twists in them. This is something that sand
cannot do!
See the spiral form of the lower central flow line? And see how it seems to glow almost? Light is shining through the dirty ice and illuminating it from within. |
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In summary, Mars has liquid water venting from geysers and springs. It also has water ice in Endurance crater and probably in many others as well. The soil is wetted constantly and that is why it takes a print so well- damp soil can where dry soil cannot. What this means is that anything that might have lived on Mars in ages past could conceivably be alive today, such as bacteria, small animals or plants, or even funguses.
This is the final piece of evidence supporting my fossil findings. Mars was covered with oceans millions of years ago, supported life almost identical to what the ancient Earth had, and followed nearly the same evolutionary path. As its atmosphere was lost, its resources because scarce but its life continued as well as it could.
Even today, there is surely still life on Mars, since liquid water has been found and has likely been there all along. We now know purely from physics that water exists on Mars, and now these images provide the visual proof that it is present there at this moment.