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Nicola Molloy (I think it was her) posted a bunch of stuff 2-3 years back about Nazis in Antarctica. Someone else (Andrew Hennessey?) posted material about the surface of Mars having all kinds of symbolism. Put it all together......... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Glacial Traces in Antarctica Offer Hints of Mars January 28, 2003 By SANDRA BLAKESLEE BEACON VALLEY, Antarctica - Scientists who study Mars have been coming here for 30 years to learn how an ultracold, bone dry climate shapes the terrestrial, and perhaps Martian, landscape. But they never, until now, thought about monster glaciers that vanish like phantoms in the night. "My mind was blown," said Dr. James Head of Brown University, a leading expert on the geology of Mars, referring to the idea that vast glaciers can ride over the land and leave only tiny traces. But he is reading these traces in the rocks and boulders of Antarctica's Dry Valleys, he said, and now that his eyes have been opened, he plans to look for similar marks on the plains of Mars as well. Dr. Head learned of phantomlike glaciers from Dr. David Marchant, an associate professor of earth sciences at Boston University, who has been studying the landforms of Antarctica's ice-free regions for 16 years. Aided by the National Science Foundation, the two scientists spent six weeks together at a remote Antarctic field camp in November and December, living in a tent, walking over rocky terrain and comparing what they saw there with unexplained features on Mars. Their journey led them into a frozen vault of Earth's history. They stood on rocks that blanket the oldest ice on the planet - the remnant of a glacier that could be anywhere from one million to eight million years old. They examined freeze-dried algae, possibly 10 million years old and possibly still alive. In the process, they hashed out some longstanding mysteries about climate change here and on Mars. The three major Dry Valleys and the mile-high mountains that separate them occupy a region about the size of Delaware and embrace some of the most unusual environments on Earth. At lower reaches, near the Ross Sea, frozen lakes partially thaw in the Antarctic summer and microscopic worms and algae come alive. Farther inland, the valleys run into mountain barriers that block ice flow from interior East Antarctica - an ice sheet up to two miles thick that covers more than 3.8 million square miles. Here the average temperature is 35 below zero. Except for tiny skiffs of snow that blow in from the ice sheet, there is no water. It has not rained for 15 million years. "This is the best preserved landscape on Earth," Dr. Marchant said. About 20 years ago, geologists realized that because of cold climate change and Antarctica's isolation, a great ice sheet had to have built up about 15 million years ago. Larger than any ice sheet before or since, it buried the Dry Valleys and nearby mountain ranges under an even deeper tomb of ice. Yet there was very little sign of it. Most of the Dry Valleys' soil seemed undisturbed. Eventually, Dr. Marchant said, the Dry Valleys helped geologists figure out that glaciers had been there but not the kind of glaciers they knew from work in the Northern Hemisphere. At the base of most glaciers is a very thin, discontinuous layer of meltwater that forms under changing pressure and temperature. Glaciers advance as temperatures fall, picking up rocks and abrading the ground in a characteristic fashion. As temperatures rise, wet-based glaciers retreat, leaving scour marks, thick sheets of debris called till and sinuous ridges called eskers. The signature is unambiguous: a glacier once passed through here. "Dave is showing me all these things and I'm thinking Mars: could something like this have happened on Mars," Dr. Head said. Mars is colder and drier than Antarctica but many of its features are similar. Spacecraft now orbiting Mars show gullies, layers of sediment that suggest ancient lake beds, ripples, polygons and hummocks. It can be misleading to apply familiar patterns on Earth to patterns on Mars, Dr. Head said. But the notion of cold-based glaciers suggests a physical process that explains certain features on the two planets. For example, a region on the western flank of a giant volcano, Arsia Mons, has large lobes of material extending down its slopes. The deposit is grooved near its edges like a phonograph record. Moreover, the ridges and grooves lie over a large impact crater. Could this have been produced by cold-based glaciers? After tramping the Dry Valleys with Dr. Marchant, Dr. Head said the answer might be yes. "I was just dumbfounded," he said. "I'd been looking at things for years and never knew what they were." Fields of polygon-shaped rocks that appear all over Mars and in the Dry Valleys are cases in point. In the Dry Valleys, "you walk around fields of polygons and you can't see anything but debris," Dr. Head said. "Then you dig down three feet and find ice, nothing but ice." Perhaps water flowed on Mars' surface and now lies frozen under its polygons. In Antarctica, Dr. Head saw puzzle rocks - broken, scattered shards that Dr. Marchant could reassemble into a single boulder. The Viking 2 lander set down among such pieces, and it looks as if they fit together, too. Another Martian mystery is the presence of pitted rocks. In the Dry Valleys, pits are formed when tiny amounts of snow melt on sun-warmed rocks and salts in the water erode tiny depressions. On Mars, people thought rock pits were caused by gases in lava, Dr. Head said, but frost landing on Martian rocks could also do the job. Fortunately for Dr. Head, he is an adviser to NASA on Mars exploration and will be able to put his theories to the test when two rovers land on the planet a year from now. The rovers "will be traversing Mars, looking behind rocks, turning them over and looking underneath, drilling holes in them and digging trenches," Dr. Head said. "We will be exploring Mars just as we do on Earth," he said, to see if the analogies make sense. "You don't see too many classic glacial deposits in the Dry Valleys," Dr. Marchant said. "Some people thought they must have eroded away," Dr. Marchant said, but that was unlikely. The Dry Valleys are too cold and dry to undergo erosion. Instead, he said, geologists now theorize that glaciers must have been so cold they would have stuck to the ground without melting. Instead of advancing and retreating, they would simply vaporize or sublimate, going from solid to gas like phantoms, leaving only extremely subtle traces. Instead of eroding the landscape, they preserve it for millions of years. Cold-based glaciers leave three calling cards: drop moraines, sublimation till and rock glacier deposits. Drop moraines are strips of rocks and boulders that resemble the ripples in a pond. Often they are only a foot high, a hundred feet long and very easy to step over without noticing. Sublimation till is debris that lies over buried ice. It often assumes the shape of irregular, interlocking polygons. Rock glaciers are larger piles of debris that form into ridges and hummocks left over when a cold-based glacier evaporates. Judging from these signs, there is little doubt that a monster cold glacier overrode the Dry Valleys 12 million to 15 million years ago, burying them, Dr. Marchant said. Then it vaporized, he said, leaving its signature all over the upper Dry Valleys - rock ripples, polygons and hummocks perched on an older landscape. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is the active descendant of this monster. It acts like a gigantic freezer hovering over the Dry Valleys with the thermostat stuck at 40 below zero. Dr. Marchant and other experts believe the ice sheet has been in place for more than 10 million years, so big and cold it controls its own weather. When the rest of Earth warms up, it will not. But other experts disagree. After finding marine fossils in some high mountain ranges toward the South Pole, they say that half to two-thirds of Antarctica's ice sheets must have melted three million to four million years ago, setting off a tremendous rise in sea level that carried marine organisms to these mountains. If these scientists are correct, global warming could eventually release enough water to flood low-lying regions all over the planet. While discussing the fate of Earth, the two geologists were thrilled to learn that one of Dr. Marchant's graduate students, Adam Lewis, had found a deposit of freeze-dried algae and insect body parts in the upper Dry Valleys. Based on ash deposits and other clues, the organic life could be more than 10 million years old, Mr. Lewis said, from a time before the monster glacier moved through the area. Because the algae are freeze-dried, not fossilized, it may be possible to bring them back to life. "We'll put it in water and see what happens," he said, after efforts to date the material are completed by the end of February. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/28/science/space/28MARS.html?ex=1044716213&ei=1&en=ae7582850881f48b HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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