MARTIAN OCEANS AND THE EFFECTS OF EPH
Did Mars prior to 65 Million years ago have an Earth like atmosphere, oceans, and support a civilization? There is evidence of oceans and many anomalous structures found in NASA photo's revealing pyramids, buildings, and human like faces. Most likely Mars was a moon of the former Fifth Planet that was destroyed 65 million years ago, possibly contributing to the build up of the Tharsis bulge and impacts. However, evidence suggests that an ocean still existed up until some two million years ago, so where did the water go? Maybe there was another EPH phenomenon 3.2 million years ago [cite: TVF EPH theory info at metaresearch homepage] that occured near Mars [Maybe existing Comets are remnant of oceans from destruction of a similar planet to Mars some 3.2 million years ago], creating a shock wave [minimal impact as compared to 65 million year event that created Tharsis bulge] that blew away the atmosphere on Mars and caused everything to go into a deep freeze including the oceans, and destruction of planet added a new layer to the asteroid belt. In other words, the Martian ocean could still be there but frozen solid under a mantle of dust.
Here is an article that suggests oceans existed up until 2 million years ago:
"Ancient Martian oceans warped by redistribution of planet's mass:
Planetary scientists have tossed around the idea that Mars once had large oceans. However, the facts before them just didn’t add up. New evidence shows that the warping of Martian rock has hidden the evidence for Martian oceans—at least, until now.
About one-third of the surface of Mars once was covered with water—that is, over two million years ago. It dried up and left flat shorelines—which is a sure sign that an ocean was once present. However, today, the water is gone and so are most of the flat shorelines.
Researchers are unsure where exactly the water went—hypothesizing that it was too much water to simply evaporate. Thus, some scientists contend that some of the water remains in underground reservoirs.
They also wondered where the flat shorelines went. However, that puzzle has been solved.
Researchers have now shown that warping of the Martian rock by a movement of the Martian poles over the past two million years or so altered the flat shorelines.
The results of the findings are published in the June 14, 2007 issue of the journal Nature. U.S. planetary scientists Mark Richards and Michael Manga, both from the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), Taylor Perron, previously from UCB but now from Harvard University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and colleagues performed the research and co-authored the Nature article.
In the paper, the researchers talk about how two oceans—the older Arabia Ocean and the younger Deuteronilus Ocean—once had two shorelines that were thousands of miles in length. Now with the water gone, scientists have always contended that the dried out shorelines were too hilly to be edges of ancient oceans.
The researchers discovered, however, that several billion years ago, a shift occurred toward the equator, which forced the shores of the two oceans to warp. This shift is likely due to a massive re-distribution of the planet’s mass. More mass was moved toward the equator and away from the poles. This is the same reason why the Earth is shaped like an oblate spheroid, a sphere with a bulging middle.
In fact, Perron states: "On planets like Mars and Earth that have an outer shell, or lithosphere, that behaves elastically, the solid surface will deform differently than the sea surface, creating a non-uniform change in the topography.”
Near the equator the shores remained flat, however as the shoreline went north or south towards the poles they warped into hilly terrains in a long wave that rose and fell (what scientists called undulated) in height as much as several kilometers along their lengths.
This change in the shoreline agreed to what happened to the axis along which the planet spins. The poles of Mars have shifted by about 1,850 miles (3,000 kilometers) over the past two or three billion years. The tilt of the rotational axis of Mars did not actually move in relations to the position of the Sun—it remained the same. However, the mass of the planet shifted.
Scientists call this shifting process true polar wander. It is known to cause topographic changes to a planet’s surface. In the case of the two Martian oceans, it caused them to change from being flat to hilly; thus, rising and falling over long distances. Scientists say that the same thing happened on the Earth, however, in distances of centimeters and meters rather than kilometers.
What does this research result mean? It adds to the possibility that large amounts of water still exist on Mars and life once existed on Mars.
A enhanced image of Mars, taken from Viking Orbiter, and topographic data, taken from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter onboard the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, shows Mars as how it might have looked two million years ago. See the image at the University of California at Berkeley’s website:
www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/06/13_mars.shtml
. Additional information about the project is also found on this website."
www.itwire.com.au/content/view/12880/1066/
John Rickey
Topic Author
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