WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A long, deep canyon and the remains of beaches are perhaps the clearest evidence yet of a standing lake on the surface of Mars -- one that apparently contained water when the planet was supposed to have already dried up, scientists said on Wednesday. Images from a camera called the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate water carved a 30-mile-(50-km-)long canyon, a team at the University of Colorado at Boulder reported. It would have covered 80 square miles (200 sq km) and been up to 1,500 feet deep, the researchers wrote in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. There is now no dispute that water exists on the surface or Mars -- robot explorers have found ice. There is also evidence that water may still seep to the surface from underground, although it quickly disappears in the cold, thin atmosphere of the red planet. Planetary scientists have also seen what could be the shores of giant rivers and seas -- but some of the formations could also arguably have been made by dry landslides. "This is the first unambiguous evidence of shorelines on the surface of Mars," said Gaetano Di Achille, who led the study. "The identification of the shorelines and accompanying geological evidence allows us to calculate the size and volume of the lake, which appears to have formed about 3.4 billion years ago," Di Achille said in a statement. Water is key to life and scientists are looking desperately for evidence of life, past or present, on Mars. Having water on the planet could also be useful to future human explorers. "On Earth, deltas and lakes are excellent collectors and preservers of signs of past life," said Di Achille. "If life ever arose on Mars, deltas may be the key to unlocking Mars' biological past," Di Achille said. "Not only does this research prove there was a long-lived lake system on Mars, but we can see that the lake formed after the warm, wet period is thought to have dissipated," assistant professor Brian Hynek said. The lake probably either evaporated or froze over after abrupt climate change, the researchers said. Its waters would have turned into vapor. No one knows what turned Mars from a warm, wet planet into the frozen, airless desert it is now. (Reporting by Maggie Fox; Editing by Eric Walsh) http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/090617/science/science_us_mars_lake_1
w00t, i believe NASA is well aware of all this stuff from decades ago, now that they are starting to give us this stuff it makes me wonder what is on the horizon. i belive they have bases on the moon and almost certainly mars. as for the destruction on mars it may have something to do with that Niburu or planet X or whatever they call it.
Ripley: Well, somebody's gonna have to go out there. Take a portable terminal, go out there and patch in manually. Hudson: Oh yeah, sure! With those things runnin' around? You can count me out Newt: My mommy always said there were no monsters - no real ones - but there are
why not? As long as mars still has a hot core, that, combined with liquid H2O could result in the presence of extremophile lifeforms like those found at the ocean floor around lava vents. You'd think that it would be impossible for creatures to survive when the PSi is off the charts, extreme heat, and toxic chemicals like sulfur bubbling around, yet the abundance of life is incredible.
lol water is the basic ingredient of life... water = bacteria (life) = evolution into animal life and plant life.. that's a proven fact because that's how there's life on earth.
lol............................. you must watch too many alien and predator movies........ knoc is right. we know exactly where this is headed. and im still sticking to what i said. i don't believe babies are drop from swans, to your door step.
haha naa i was just gona see what he said then say "ok cool", i cant deny a person his opinion, i just wasnt aware of it being fact -doh. would suk if babies got droped by swans, to think all those women around the world having unnessasery things pushed through the neather regions. anyway, you stick to what you say.. "ok cool"
lol w/e dude.. i believe in aliens. the universe is huge, and there are plenty of stars like our own sun, i'm pretty sure one of them has to have life.
^ cuz the universe is huge. There's a chance that interstellar travel could be impossible anyway. If there is no ways around our current understanding of the laws of physics, then its certainly possible that the human race will be stuck within our solar system forever. parallel to that, any alien species out there may be also stuck within their own regions of space.
Although there is some sort of evidence that UFOs exist but we have never acutally seen anythign that is pretty much alien, but due to lack of hard evidence, no one would believe much in alien abduction, but I do believe there is some sort of time parrallel that we all get stuck in like fearless said but maybe the people in other time and sapce is ALOT more advance than us?
