Martian Gullies Not Carved by Water

Bad news for the search for liquid water on Mars.  The gullies that up to now were believed to have formed through the flow of liquid water were actually created by dry ice.  These gullies tend to grow and be active during the winter, and winter on Mars is far too cold for liquid water to be doing anything remotely close to the surface.

We thought these gullies were formed by liquid water because that's how they're formed on Earth, and it only made sense that a geologic feature on Mars that looks exactly like a geologic feature on Earth would be made through the same process.  Dry ice can create the same sort of gullies, and it is far more likely that the gullies form through dry ice activity.  Sublimation loosens the ground, triggering avalanches, while also reducing the friction between particles, causing them to flow more easily.

There is still hope for liquid water on Mars today.  There is another kind of feature called recurring slope lineae, dark streaks running down slopes.  These form over the summer, making it more likely they are created through the activity of liquid water.

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Giant Ocean Vortices Found

On the surface, it looks like the ocean doesn't do a whole lot by itself.  Sure, there are waves, but those are caused by the wind.  Other than the massive ocean currents that fuel our climates, it doesn't seem like the ocean does very much.  But that is not the case.  By very patiently and accurately bouncing radar waves off the surface of the water, scientists were able to construct a very accurate elevation map of the ocean, finding there were often small depressions, the signature of an ocean eddy.  To find their volume, a whole fleet of small, automatic submersibles were used.  Seriously, there's 3,000 of the things all over the world, and we never hear about them.  Thanks news.

Anyway, these mesoscale eddies, as scientists are calling them (since they're medium in size), are about 60 miles across and about 3,000 feet in depth, and move very slowly, only about three miles a day.  These eddies are important because they're moving vast quantities of water, and therefore transporting lots of whatever is floating in the water.  They could also have a major effect on Earth's climate, and if they do, it's important to learn as much as we can about them. 

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Lots of Water Below Earth's Crust

Scientists have suspected for quite a while that there was water in the Earth's mantle, trapped inside certain minerals, but there are obvious difficulties in proving that theory.  We've put men on the moon, but the farthest down we've ever drilled is about 40,000 feet, and that took nearly 20 years.  We know very little about the interior of our planet because it is so difficult to obtain any sort of direct observation.

It looks like scientists have found their subsurface water.  There may be entire oceans worth of water bound up inside a mineral known as ringwoodite in the form of hydroxide ions.  I'm not much of a geologist, so I would highly recommend reading the article because I'm not sure I would summarize correctly, but it is nice to know that Earth has plenty of water still in reserve.  We can't get to it, but it's there.

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Alien Life Will Be Difficult to Find

It will be a long time before we find life like this.

We are very near the point, technologically speaking, where mankind will be able to find life on another world, whether on a far-off exoplanet or within our own solar system.  However, actually finding it will be a formidable challenge.  The problem is simple, and best said in my favorite book, "Space is big.  You won't believe just how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.  I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

Even looking for life within our solar system is difficult.  Take Europa.  There's an ocean underneath the icy surface that very likely hosts some sort of life.  However, there's no guarantee that life inhabits the entire ocean, and since scientists predict that Europa probably has even more water than Earth, we might not even find life on our first visit, which is looking like it will happen in about ten years.  We've been looking for life on Mars for years now, and we haven't gotten anywhere with that either.  We can't even say that life on Mars is unlikely, because we've explored so little of the planet, and life could be hiding in so many places.  So, even though the technology is there, actually finding life may take a while.  It's important to be patient with this sort of science.

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Cosmos Episode 6 Thoughts

The universe is more than stars and galaxies.  The massive cosmos we see around us is just one of many, and that is what tonight's episode was all about.  There are so many different worlds beyond what we can see, even in something as mundane as a drop of water.  That is where we started, examining the life that exists, and even flourishes, in a speck of early morning dew.  It's remarkable to think about how life can live in such a place, a drop of water that is only around for a couple of hours.  Or as my roommate said, "I'm never drinking water again."  Some people don't like drinking a whole bunch of microorganisms, I don't know.  I've always thought paramecium added a nice bit of flavor, but I guess I'm alone on that one.

Next we took a tour of a plant cell and a chloroplast, taking a peek at the remarkable process of photosynthesis.  Three billion years of tinkering has turned photosynthesis into an incredible workhorse.  If we could efficiently photosynthesize for our civilization's energy, we really wouldn't have any problems with energy anymore. 

As with all episodes of Cosmos, the past is as important as the present, or the future.  Today, we traveled back to ancient Greece, and the ancient scientist Democritus.  He was the first to posit that everything was made of tiny, indivisible particles, the first to realize that there was a world beyond what we could see.

Of course, all of these things, from the single celled organisms to the chloroplasts, even atoms themselves, are enormous compared to the neutrino.  There are literally billions of them passing through each one of us every second, yet it requires a gigantic pool of water in an elaborate chamber a half mile underground to reliably detect even a few of them.  They don't really interact much with matter, but they are still important, because as Tyson said, they can give us a window to the very early universe.  There is no light from the first 380,000 years of the universe, space was too dense to allow photons to pass through.  Neutrinos can pass right through, and neutrinos from the Big Bang could give us clues as to what the very early universe was doing.

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Enceladus Underground Ocean

It has been known for a few years now that liquid water was present on Saturn's moon, Enceladus, but the question was, how much water was there?  Cassini data has recently revealed the likely extent of the water, and it appears to be a fully-fledged ocean underneath the ice.

Water Plumes on Enceladus

According to the data, the mass of the liquid water is only about that of Lake Superior, but considering that Enceladus is only 300 miles across, this translates to a potentially moon-wide ocean that is on average 6 miles deep, underneath about 20 miles of ice.

Cassini was able to detect the presence of liquid water through precise gravitational mapping.  Simply put, Cassini's close encounters with Enceladus were gravitationally affected more than it should have been had there been only solid ice.  This indicates the presence of liquid water, which is more dense and would give the moon slightly more mass.

As of right now, scientists are not sure if the ocean is global or not, because Cassini's close fly-bys were over the southern hemisphere.  However, they are very certain that an ocean exists under the southern hemisphere.  This discovery puts Enceladus right at the top of candidates for alien life in our solar system.  It also becomes the easiest target for further exploration into extraterrestrial life, because it is constantly shooting off water into space, which a probe can analyze.  Cassini's basic instruments have already detected carbon and other basic organic molecules, a more advanced instrument could potentially detect far more.  This alone makes it a more inviting target than Europa, which is similar in many ways but may not have active water jets.

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