Potentially habitable flow-like features from Martian dry ice geyser dune spots: Difference between revisions
Potentially habitable flow-like features from Martian dry ice geyser dune spots (edit)
Revision as of 05:42, 28 September 2018
, 5 years agono edit summary
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
Line 1:
[[File:Flow-like-features.gif|thumb|Flow-like-features|Larger region of the Richardson crater dune field showing the dark dune spots and flow-like features. ]][[File:Flow-like-features detail.gif|thumb|Flow-like-features detail|Detailed zoom into the flow-like features around
These features near the Martian polar regions are associated with the [[Geyser (Mars)|Martian Geysers]]. Before these geysers were well understood, there was a lot of speculation about what they might be. The seasonal patterns they form resemble trees and vegetation, and in 2001 looking at the Mars Global Surveyor images, Arthur C. Clarke called them "Banyan trees"<ref name=Foulke2001>Nicole Foulke, [https://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2001-12/banyan-trees-mars The Banyan trees of Mars], Popular science e-mail interview with Arthur C. Clarke, December 17, 2001</ref>, saying, only half joking "I'm now convinced that Mars is inhabited by a race of demented landscape gardeners,"<ref name=ClarkeSmithsonian2001>Arthur C. Clarke, speaking by teleophone for the [http://www.martianspiders.com/Sir%20Arthur%20C_%20Clarke%20at%20the%20Smithsonian,%20June%202001.htm Wernher von Braun Memorial Lecture], Smithsonian institute's National Air and Space Museum, June 6, 2001 - reported by John C. Sherwood</ref>, and a team of Hungarian scientists proposed that they might be the result of spreading colonies of overwintering photosynthetic microbial life. <ref name=Andras/>
|