Just to balance it up .. this one appeared just the other day … (notice it was NASA spinning the optimistic story .. again .. )
NASA research offers new prospect of water on Mars
Quote:
|
NASA scientists are seeing new evidence that suggests traces of water on Mars are under a thin varnish of iron oxide, or rust, similar to conditions found on desert rocks in California's Mojave Desert.
|
.. all invented to explain why the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft's spectrographic camera
can't detect more carbonates than expected.
Notice that they're modelling it all on the conditions in the Mojave Desert (on Earth !). The gist is that they're imagining that 'missing' carbonates on Mars, which would be indicative of the presence of 'big' liquid water in the past, might be buried under a 'varnish of iron oxide 'skin'.
Invoking some kind of condition, which may exist somewhere exotic on Earth, to me, is the problem with a lot of this type of speculation. Its vastly different from basing hypotheses on pure physics or chemistry. The formation of geology is subject to Complexity (a flow-on from Chaos Theory). As such, determinism is not the logical outcome of such processes.
They're all caught up with trying to continue the story about previous 'vast oceans' of water … which then forces them into having to invoke some kind of mysterious, catastrophic disappearance phenomenon.
Cheers