When a Mega-Tsunami Drowned Mars, This Spot May Have Been Ground Zero
The 75-mile-wide crater could be something like a Chicxulub crater for the red planet.
By
Today, Mars is a cold, dry world, home to dust devils and robotic explorers. But many scientists suspect it was once waterlogged.
A new study, published last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, suggests that a 75-mile-wide impact scar in the Martian northern lowlands is to the red planet what the Chicxulub crater is to Earth: the mark of a meteor that generated a mega-tsunami when the planet was relatively young. If accurate, the finding adds evidence to the hypothesis that Mars once had an ocean, and would have implications for our search for life there.
Whether Mars was ever warm and wet enough to retain a long-lived liquid water ocean has long been debated by planetary scientists. Several climate models have indicated that it was probably too cold. But other researchers point to ancient river deltas and other geological evidence of a northern ocean some 3.7 billion years ago.
Additional evidence includes hints of mangled, buried coastlines visible from orbit; these suggest that mega-tsunamis with skyscraper-high waves inundated parts of Mars’s northern shores around three billion years ago. On a world believed to have lacked Earthlike plate tectonics, any tsunamis were probably triggered by a meteor slamming into a huge body of water.
The area where the northern ocean was thought to exist also contains what are called thumbprint terrains, found on the landward side of those suspected ancient shorelines. These terrains may have been etched by the chaotic and violent flow of water in the aftermath of the mega-tsunamis. But which craters were tied to the impacts responsible for those mega-tsunamis was long a mystery.
In 2017, a team led by François Costard, a planetary geomorphologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, used computer modeling to reproduce the mega-tsunamis most likely to have created those thumbprint terrains. That narrowed it down to a handful of impact craters.
For the new paper, Dr. Costard and his colleagues examined these candidate craters and ultimately zeroed in on Lomonosov, which was likely forged by a 9-by-12 mile meteor in just the right place at just the right time.
Its rim is also roughly the same height as the estimated depth of the ocean. Crucially, it physically resembles Earth’s marine craters, suggesting — if not definitively demonstrating — that it was created in a shallow ocean.
Another clue is the hole in the crater’s southern section. The plains there are tilted up toward the southern highlands. It’s possible that the ocean, displaced by the impact, would have rushed back most aggressively from this direction, bursting through the crater’s southern rim.
Alexis Rodriguez, a Mars geomorphologist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., and co-author of the new study, said the remnants of this Martian ocean may be a good target in the search for evidence of life on the red planet.
The ocean may have been fed by catastrophic floods from underground caches of liquid water. If so, sediments in the north “may be a window into the subsurface habitability of Mars,” Dr. Rodriguez said. If they contain geochemical signatures of ancient microbiology, then the liquid aquifers thought to exist beneath Mars’ surface may still be reservoirs for life today.
Of course, all this depends on whether a northern ocean actually existed — a conclusion challenged by studies of the red planet’s ancient climate. Dr. Rodriguez calls this one of the “core paradoxes” of Martian planetary science.
Paul Byrne, a planetary geologist at North Carolina State University who was not involved with the study, agreed: “It’s fair to say that we don’t yet fully understand the history of Mars’s climate, and certainly, the climate models we use will continue to be improved.”
Despite compelling geological evidence, he said, scientists still don’t have unambiguous proof of a northern ocean. “So the climate models might not be wrong,” he added — but more data is needed to say one way or the other.
Restanten van 385 miljoen jaar oud oerbos gevonden in staat New York - HLN.be
Bron: ANP
Christopher Berry, paleobotanist aan de Universiteit van Cardiff in het Verenigd Koninkrijk, was aanvankelijk sceptisch over de vondst en dacht dat een recente boom in de rots was gegroeid en weggehaald. Eenmaal ter plaatse erkende hij dat de fossielen ” heel, heel veel ouder” waren. Het onderzoeksteam veronderstelt dat het bos door een catastrofale overstroming is vergaan. Bij de grootste bomen zijn ook fossielen van vissen gevonden.
De ontdekking biedt een momentopname van een van de grote overgangsperioden van de planeet, tussen een aarde zonder bossen en een aarde die bedekt is met bossen, zegt Berry. De nu ontdekte fossielen zijn ongeveer 140 miljoen jaar ouder dan de eerste dinosaurussen die over de aarde zwierven. Het oudst bekende insect leefde ongeveer 400 miljoen jaar geleden.
Christopher Berry@nb2701_berryScientists have discovered the world’s oldest forest—and its radical impact on life https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/12/scientists-have-discovered-world-s-oldest-forest-and-its-radical-impact-life …
Scientists have discovered the world’s oldest forest—and its radical impact on life
Fossil roots helped suck up carbon from atmosphere, fundamentally changing the climate
sciencemag.org
Simon Wood@MrSimonWoodOldest fossil forest found in Cairo, New York, 2-3m years older (at 368m years) than previously known oldest forest. Article contains wise words from @nb2701_berry https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/19/worlds-oldest-known-fossil-forest-found-in-new-york-quarry …
World's oldest known fossil forest found in New York quarry
Trees would have been home to primitive insects about 150m years before dinosaurs evolved
theguardian.com
2010 - 2020: Wat hebben we geleerd? 16 wetenschappelijke lessen uit het afgelopen decennium
Beeld Hilde Harshagen
Het klimaat begint voelbaar te veranderen en insecten leggen massaal het loodje. Traditiegetrouw zetten we aan het eind van elk jaar de opmerkelijkste lessen op een rij – deze keer blikken we meteen maar terug op het hele decennium. Er is ook vrolijker nieuws: de duurzame revolutie komt op gang, traumatherapie werkt echt en we gaan niet meer dood aan ziekten die tien jaar geleden nog fataal waren.
In de jaren tien veranderde de opwarming van de aarde van een ietwat abstracte statistiek tot voelbare werkelijkheid. Dit is nog maar het begin, zeggen kenners eenstemmig.
Fraude, scoringsdrang, opschepperij: niets menselijks bleek wetenschappers vreemd in de jaren tien. Heeft de strijd tegen broddelwetenschap al iets opgeleverd?
Sinds 2015 beschikken sterrenkundigen over een nieuwe manier om naar het heelal te kijken: zwaartekrachtgolven. Zo is het heelal niet meer alleen te zien, maar ook te horen.
Ziekten waaraan patiënten tien jaar geleden nog overleden, zijn – soms dankzij biomedische hoogstandjes – ineens niet meer dodelijk.
Kunstmatige intelligentie kan steeds beter diagnoses stellen, creditcardfraude detecteren, muziek componeren en teksten vertalen. Is AI op weg de mens te overvleugelen?
Een Duits-Nederlandse studie zette de dramatische afname van het aantal insecten op de kaart. En nu is de klimaatverandering eens niet de grootste verdachte.
Terwijl het standaardmodel van de deeltjesfysica bijna alle fundamentele natuurkrachten beschrijft, is er nog wel één grote ontbrekende: de zwaartekracht.
Rekenen met de regels van Moeder Natuur zelf. Dat is de belofte van de quantumcomputer, het langverwachte rekenbeest dat tot voor kort vooral een gedachtenexperiment was.
Ze komen het lichaam binnen via de lucht, drinkwater, voedsel of cosmetica. Er zijn verontrustende signalen over wat microplastics daar doen, alleen is niet bekend wat die waard zijn.
Te oud voor een openhartoperatie? Met een vernuftige ingreep via de lies is een aortaklep tegenwoordig óók te vervangen. En je hoeft er niet eens voor onder narcose.
Tien jaar geleden was er nog geen Zwarte Pietendebat, geen discussie over termen als de Gouden Eeuw of figuren als J.P. Coen. Kunt u het zich nog voorstellen?
Met een collectebus langs de deuren voor onderzoek naar een (obscure) ziekte? Kansloos. Wie de aandacht van donateurs wil, denkt groot en organiseert een gala.
Hernieuwbare energie kan inmiddels op prijs concurreren met fossiele en wint sneller terrein dan werd voorspeld. Maar het aandeel ervan in het totale energieverbruik is nog beperkt, zeker in Nederland.
Het was het decennium waarin archeologen ons beeld van de geschiedenis op zijn kop zetten. Niet door te graven in de grond – maar in ons dna.
Opeens was er ‘Crispr-Cas’, een vervreemdende genetische techniek die de wereld op zijn kop zet. Verwacht mensdieren, genetisch gemanipuleerde baby’s en wondergenezingen op maat. Of wacht: die zijn er al.
Wat nog altijd niet lukt bij depressies, burn-outs en fobieën, lukt wel bij ptss. Emdr-therapie verhelpt trauma’s snel en bewezen effectief. Een revolutie, zegt psycholoog Ad de Jongh.
Kunstmatige intelligentie is de mens steeds vaker te slim af
The real reasons the US government is so secretive about UFOsZijn dit de echte redenen waarom de Amerikaanse overheid zo geheimzinnig doet over UFO’s?
Lange tijd werd er lacherig gedaan over UFO’s. Toen bleek ineens dat het Pentagon jarenlang in het geheim onderzoek had gedaan naar UFO’s en daarover had gelogen.
Politiek journalist Tom Rogan denkt te weten waarom de overheid al die tijd heeft gelogen.
Deze objecten worden namelijk niet gemaakt door mensen.
“Ze bereiken snelheden van honderden knopen onderwater en halen in een oogwenk hypersonische snelheden,” zei hij op Fox News.
Daarnaast maken ze gebruik van antizwaartekracht.
We hebben het hier over technologieën waar de Verenigde Staten, China of Rusland niet over beschikken, zei Rogan.
“De mensen in het Pentagon weten niet precies waar ze mee te maken hebben,” vervolgde hij.
“Ze hebben geconcludeerd dat ze hier niet vandaan komen,” zei de journalist.
Ze staan dus voor een raadsel, benadrukte hij.
Er zijn volgens Rogan twee mogelijkheden: ze zijn buitenaards of komen uit een andere dimensie.
Hij wees erop dat dezelfde soort objecten tijdens de Koude Oorlog een aantal Amerikaanse en Russische intercontinentale raketten hebben uitgeschakeld.
“Het zijn hoe dan ook intelligente machines,” besloot hij.
Onlangs schreef Rogan voor de Washington Examiner een opiniestuk over de echte redenen waarom de Amerikaanse overheid zo geheimzinnig doet over UFO’s.
Bekijk het filmpje hieronder:
[Fox News]
Pole Shift: NASA Contractor Has Dire Warning of Magnetic Pole Reversal, North Pole Has Passed Prime Meridian
Mr. Allison is currently the Program Manager for the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5) High Altitude Lift-Off (HALO) Program, and as President of the High Altitude Research Corporation (HARC). In these capacities Mr. Allison is actively developing cheap access to space technologies.
Earth’s Magnetic North Pole Is Moving Faster Than Ever, Leaving Scientists Baffled
Mr. Allison has worked on the International Space Station Program for Grumman as a systems engineer specializing in robotics, for the Mevatec Corporation as an electrical power systems integration engineer, and for Teledyne Brown Engineering as a payload integration engineer for external space station experiments.
Mr. Allison is currently working for Hernandez Engineering as a safety and product assurance engineer on such projects as Orbital Space Plane, X-37 and HyTEx. Mr. Allison also studies means to defend Earth from asteroids, and the construction of large-scale space stations.
Scientists Uncover World’s Oldest Forest
Scientists have discovered remnants of the world’s oldest fossil forest in a sandstone quarry in Cairo, New York.
It is believed the extensive network of trees, which would have spread from New York all the way into Pennsylvania and beyond, is around 386 million years old.
This makes the Cairo forest around 2 or 3 million years older than what was thought to be the world’s oldest forest at Gilboa, also in New York State and around 40 km away from the Cairo site.
The new findings, which have been published today in the journal Current Biology, have thrown new light on the evolution of trees and the transformative role they played in shaping the world we live in today.
A team led by scientists at Binghamton University, New York State Museum and Cardiff University have mapped over 3,000 square meters of the forest at the abandoned quarry in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains in the Hudson Valley.
Their investigations showed that the forest was home to at least two types of trees: cladoxylopsids, primitive tree-fern-like plants, which lacked flat green leaves, and which also grew in vast numbers at Gilboa; and Archaeopteris, which had a conifer-like woody trunk and frond-like branches which had green flattened leaves.
A single example of a third type of tree was also uncovered, which remained unidentified but could possibly have been a lycopod.
All these trees reproduced using only spores rather than seeds.
The team also reported a ‘spectacular’ and extensive network of roots which were more than eleven meters in length in some places which belonged to the Archaeopteris trees.
It is these long-lived woody roots, with multiple levels of branching and small, short-lived perpendicular feeder roots, that transformed the interactions of plants and soils and were therefore pivotal to the co-evolution of forests and the atmosphere’, the researchers state.
Until this point in time, trees such as the cladoxylopsids only had ribbon-like and mostly unbranched roots which had to be constantly replaced as the plant above ground grew.
They believe the forest was eventually wiped out by a flood due to the presence of many fish fossils that were also visible on the surface of the quarry.
“It is surprising to see plants which were previously thought to have had mutually exclusive habitat preferences growing together on the ancient Catskill delta,” said co-author of the study Dr Chris Berry from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences.
“This would have looked like a fairly open forest with small to moderate sized coniferous-looking trees with individual and clumped tree-fern like plants of possibly smaller size growing between them.”
The research team say that the Cairo forest is older than the one at Gilboa because the fossils were lower down in the sequence of rocks that occur in the Catskill mountains.
“In order to really understand how trees began to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, we need to understand the ecology and habitats of the very earliest forests, and their rooting systems.” continued Dr Berry.
“These remarkable findings have allowed us to move away from the generalities of the importance of large plants growing in forests, to the specifics of which plants, in which habitats, in which types of ecology were driving the processes of global change. We have literally been able to drill into the fossil soil between the trees and are now able to investigate geochemical changes to the soil with our colleagues at Sheffield University.
“We are really getting a handle on the transition of the Earth to a forested planet.”
Contacts and sources:
Simulated UFO Abductions: When Did Mind-Control Programs Begin?
I’ve written a few articles over the course of the past week, and into this week, on the matter of what have rapidly become known as “simulated UFO abductions.” The theory is that these “abductions” – primarily in the 1950s onward – were not the work of aliens, but the work of intelligence agencies, possibly to determine how easy (or difficult) it might be to fabricate an alien encounter. After all, if you can hoax an E.T. incident then maybe you can fabricate something amazing on the battlefield and, in the process, freak out the enemy. In that sense, perhaps the abductions amounted to forerunners of bigger, far grander plans. We’re talking about the likes of the CIA’s controversial MKULTRA “mind-control” program. One person who read my article of December 23 asked if agencies, in the 1950s, had the ability to pull something like this off – and to do so 100 percent successfully. The guy asked: “Didn’t the CIA’s MKultra not start til early-middle 50s? Would they have time [to pull such a thing off]?” Well, yes, that’s a very good point. But, it’s a lesser known fact that the CIA’s mind-control ops actually kicked off at the very start of the 1950s. Also, further programs, run by other agencies, began back in the 1940s! Let’s see what history tells us all about that.
It was during August 1977 that The Senate MKULTRA Hearings were organized by what became known as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Committee on Human Resources. It turns out that as the committee dug deeper it found that there were similar programs which predated MKUltra. They were Artichoke and Bluebird. The Committee revealed what it had uncovered: “The earliest of the CIA’s major programs involving the use of chemical and biological agents, Project Bluebird, was approved by the Director in 1950. Its objectives were: (a) discovering means of conditioning personnel to prevent unauthorized extraction of information from them by known means, (b) investigating the possibility of control of an individual by application of special interrogation techniques, (c) memory enhancement, and (d) establishing defensive means for preventing hostile control of Agency personnel.”
CIA headquarters
As for Artichoke, there are these words for the committee: “As a result of interrogations conducted overseas during the project, another goal was added – the evaluation of offensive uses of unconventional interrogation techniques, including hypnosis and drugs. In August 1951, the project was renamed Artichoke. Project Artichoke included in-house experiments on interrogation techniques, conducted ‘under medical and security controls which would ensure that no damage was done to individuals who volunteer for the experiments. Overseas interrogations utilizing a combination of sodium pentothal and hypnosis after physical and psychiatric examinations of the subjects were also part of Artichoke. Information about Project Artichoke after the fall of 1953 is scarce. The CIA maintains that the project ended in 1956, but evidence suggests that Office of Security and Office of Medical Services use of ‘special interrogation’ techniques continued for several years thereafter.”
A special procedure, designated MKDelta, was established to govern the use of MKUltra materials when specifically utilized in overseas operations. Such materials were used on a number of occasions. According to the Committee: “Because MKUltra records were destroyed, it is impossible to reconstruct the operational use of MKUltra materials by the CIA overseas; it has been determined that the use of these materials abroad began in 1953, and possibly as early as 1950.” The Committee revealed more on MKDelta: “Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKUltra/MKDelta materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes. According to an Inspector General Survey of the Technical Services Division of the CIA in 1957 – an inspection which did not discover the MKUltra project involving the surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting, non-volunteer subjects – the CIA had developed six drugs for operational use and they had been used in six different operations on a total of thirty-three subjects. By 1963 the number of operations and subjects had increased substantially.”
The Committee discovered that the U.S. Army had been working on such programs, too. In its 1977 report, the Committee revealed the following: “There were three major phases in the Army’s testing of LSD. In the first, LSD was administered to more than 1,000 American soldiers who volunteered to be subjects in chemical warfare experiments. In the second phase, Material Testing Program EA 1729, 95 volunteers received LSD in clinical experiments designed to evaluate potential intelligence uses of the drug. In the third phase, Projects Third Chance and Derby Hat, 16 unwitting non-volunteer subjects were interrogated after receiving LSD as part of operational field tests.”
Moving on, there is what the committee learned about an operation called Chatter: “Project Chatter was a Navy program that began in the fall of 1947. Responding to reports of amazing results achieved by the Soviets in using truth drugs, the program focused on the identification and the testing of such drugs for use in interrogations and in the recruitment of agents. The research included laboratory experiments on animals and human subjects involving Anabasis aphylla, scopolamine, and mescaline in order to determine their speech-inducing qualities. Overseas experiments were conducted as part of the project. The project expanded substantially during the Korean War, and ended shortly after the war, in 1953.”
MKNaomi was yet another operation on which the committee found a lot. It was designed: (a) To provide for a covert support base to meet clandestine operational requirements; (b) To stockpile severely incapacitating and lethal materials for the specific use of TSD [Technical Services Division]; (c) To maintain in operational readiness special and unique items for the dissemination of biological and chemical materials; (d) To provide for the required surveillance, testing, upgrading, and evaluation of materials and items in order to assure absence of defects and complete predictability of results to be expected under operational conditions.”
Under an agreement reached with the Army in 1952, the Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick was to assist CIA in developing, testing, and maintaining biological agents and delivery systems – some of which were directly related to mind-control experimentation. By this agreement, the CIA finally acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons specifically suited for CIA use. The Committee also noted: “SOD developed darts coated with biological agents and pills containing several different biological agents which could remain potent for weeks or months. SOD developed a special gun for firing darts coated with a chemical which could allow CIA agents to incapacitate a guard dog, enter an installation secretly, and return the dog to consciousness when leaving. SOD scientists were unable to develop a similar incapacitant [sic] for humans. SOD also physically transferred to CIA personnel biological agents in ‘bulk’ form, and delivery devices, including some containing biological agents.”
In addition to the CIA’s interest in using biological weapons and mind-control against humans, it also asked SOD to study use of biological agents against crops and animals. In its 1967 memorandum, the CIA stated: “Three methods and systems for carrying out a covert attack against crops and causing severe crop loss have been developed and evaluated under field conditions. This was accomplished in anticipation of a requirement which was later developed but was subsequently scrubbed just prior to putting into action.”
The Committee concluded with respect to MKNaomi that the project was “…terminated in 1970. On November 25, 1969, President Nixon renounced the use of any form of biological weapons that kill or incapacitate and ordered the disposal of existing stocks of bacteriological weapons. On February 14, 1970, the President clarified the extent of his earlier order and indicated that toxins – chemicals that are not living organisms but are produced by living organisms – were considered biological weapons subject to his previous directive and were to be destroyed. Although instructed to relinquish control of material held for the CIA by SOD, a CIA scientist acquired approximately 11 grams of shellfish toxin from SOD personnel at Fort Detrick which were stored in a little-used CIA laboratory where it went undetected for five years.”
Given that Project Chatter was quietly created way back in 1947, it’s not at all impossible that by the mid-to-late 1950s those “simulated UFO abductions” couldn’t have been working very well and convincing people they had been abducted when they weren’t – or, at least, not by extraterrestrials.
Dark UFO Seen During Sunset As Scream Is Heard, Dec 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Dark UFO Seen During Sunset As Scream Is Heard, Dec 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Orb Fleet Over Rochester, New York During Day On Dec 25, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Orb Fleet Over Rochester, New York During Day On Dec 25, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Letter B And Alien Base Found On Mars, 100% Proof Of Alien Life, UFO Sighting News.
Letter B And Alien Base Found On Mars, 100% Proof Of Alien Life, UFO Sighting News.
Black UFO Hovers Near Power Lines In New York! Dec 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Black UFO Hovers Near Power Lines In New York! Dec 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Plane passenger films weird rectangular glow above the clouds in Kazakhstan
This day in UFO history: The 1980 UFO Landings In Rendlesham Forest
England holds one of the most compelling UFO landing accounts. In late December 1980, invasion of unidentified flying objects over a period of several nights took place in the joint air bases of Bentwaters and Woodbridge, situated within the vast Rendlesham Forest in late December.
Description of alien beings added to the controversial stories of the twin air bases. The hype took into another level with anomalous radar readings, electromagnetic effects, and surrealistic atmospheric conditions. Professionals, deemed to be credible, have been coming forward revealing their knowledge of the real alien event on the Bentwaters and Woodbridge Air Force Bases.
Uncorrelated object showed on the radar screens at RAF in Norfolk shortly after midnight on December 27, 1980. The thing then suddenly vanished in the area of the Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk. Bentwaters RAF radar also picked up the object.
The bases were allegedly housed a large stockpile of nuclear weapons, and the Woodbridge was the base of the 67th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron.
The radar operator that night, Mal Scurrah, said that they did not have any idea of what they captured on their radar. They checked the air traffic agencies and found out that there should have been nothing in the vicinity at the time. They sent a jet aircraft to investigate, and the pilot reported seeing a dazzling light in the sky in front of them after getting within about a quarter of a mile.
They saw on radar the object was stationary and it moved off in seconds. In just five minutes the UFO reached 90,000 feet and higher, and they had lost it in the radar scope.
The Woodbridge/Bentwaters started their extraordinary events with the sighting of a massive glowing object by three security guards of the twin bases. They followed the lights into the forest with initial thought that it was a commercial or military aircraft that crash landed.
The patrol was stunned to see a saucer-like craft with small beings with large heads suspended by a type of beam from the bottom of the craft. The beings reportedly performing a repair to their craft unaware of the three men watching their activities.
The guards radioed the base headquarters and requested emergency help. Assistance reportedly arrived headed by senior officers of the base. Later, there would be off record reports that they encountered strange anomalies, such as reality-bending, time displacement, and surreal atmospheric conditions.
Some of the senior officers allegedly communicated with the alien beings.
Called out on the second night of the sightings was then the now famous Colonel Halt. The group of Colonel Halt was reportedly one of the groups to chase the glowing UFO in the forest. He made an audio recording of the details of his trek into the woods.
Patrolmen Jim Penniston, John Burroughs, and Larry Warren later co-wrote a book about the incident, titled Left at East Gate.
Other men who were present during the encounter later revealed that there was an underground theater where soldiers were interrogated, sworn to secrecy and threatened. They also revealed that they were shown several films featuring UFO recoveries around the world. It was also reported that an alien being was there in one of the meetings.
OTHER VIDEOS, selected by peter2011
The Asteroids Might Remember a Forgotten Giant Planet
We have much to learn from the rocks of the asteroid belt.
The formation of the solar system is a deeply perplexing puzzle. We're left with clues all over the place: the positions and sizes of the planets, the members of the asteroid belt, Kuiper Belt, and Oort Cloud and the populations of moons around the planets. But how did we get to this from a vague disk of gas and dust billions of years ago?
Simulations and models lead the way, and recently researchers have turned to the asteroid belt for more help: the asteroids living closest to the sun actually preserve a memory from when the solar system was still evolving, and might even offer clues to the hypothesis that we once had five giant planets.
Billions of years ago, our solar system was just a bunch of random gas and dust floating around as a nebula. As it collapsed, it formed a rapidly spinning merry-go-round of a flat disk around the young and hungry proto-sun. Over the course of 100 million years, that disk somehow became the planets and other smaller denizens of our home system.
Computer simulations of the disk-to-planet process are fantastically difficult, due to all the rich and complex physics involved, but they have a few general features. The innermost worlds tend to be small and rocky, while the outermost planets tend to be big and gassy and/or icy. Plus the process of formation leads to a bunch of random junk floating around.
Another general feature is that newborn planets tend to move quickly into resonant motion, meaning that orbits become integer multiples of each other. For example, Mars might orbit four times for every Jupiter orbit, and Jupiter might orbit twice for every turn around the sun that Saturn gets.
And when it comes to our solar system in particular, in simulations the giant planets tend to form much closer together, and much closer to the sun, than they are today.
So then the question becomes: Once we've got a batch of baby planets formed from our protostellar disk, how do we get those planets in their modern-day positions?
Enter the Nice Model, named after the city in southern France where a few sun-baked researchers cooked up the idea in 2005. In the bare-bones version of the model, the too-close-for-comfort giant planets are surrounded by a disk of leftovers: tiny planetesimals that never got to play the planet game and had to hang out in the outskirts of the solar system.
But not for long. Every so slowly, over the course of 100 million years, the outermost giant planet (usually thought to be Neptune, but in some versions of the model it's Uranus) drifts close to one of those leftovers. Close enough to interact gravitationally, doing a little orbital dance where the planet pulls the bit of rock inward to a smaller orbit, and in exchange sends itself farther out.
And then that little scattered rock encounters the next planet in and does the same thing. And then it approaches Saturn and repeats the process again, going ever sunward and spreading out three of the giant planets.
And then that plucky little planetesimal finds Jupiter, who is generally in no mood for games and doesn't like to be told what to do. Instead of nudging the rock inward, the massive bulk of our system's largest planet just sends that unlucky bit of debris out of the solar system altogether. That doesn't come without a price, however; the energy needed to eject the planetesimal reduces Jupiter's own orbit, sending it slightly closer to the sun.
This model is able to explain in large part the modern-day positions of the planets, and how they were able to get there from their birthplaces. And since 2005, more sophisticated versions of the Nice Model have appeared, trying to explain finer details of our system's makeup, including the possibility that we once were home to a fifth giant planet that got lost in all the gravitational reshuffling.
But all versions of the Nice Model have a particular problem with the asteroid belt. All that orbital dancing in the outer system can have big impacts on the inner worlds and their own population of planetary leftovers. The on-again-off-again gravitational resonances that the outer planets experience as they migrate to and fro in the outer reaches destabilize members of the nascent asteroid belt, scattering them into all sorts of crazy orbits.
In particular, the various versions of the Nice Model tend to send the innermost belt members (the chunks of rock within 2.5 astronomical units) into orbits with high inclination, meaning that they're angled with respect to the rest of the solar system. (One astronomical unit, or AU, is the average Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.) And yet, we find most asteroids are on an even keel with the major planets, so we must be getting something wrong in our models.
Recently, a team of researchers took a more refined approach to the simulations, looking especially at the interactions of Jupiter and Saturn as they waltzed together in the early days of the solar system. The scientists found that during the process of planetary migration, Jupiter and Saturn approach a 5:2 resonance, meaning that Jupiter orbits five times for every two orbits of Saturn.
They don't stay in that resonance for long. But the details of Saturn's orbit while near the resonance give it just the right gravitational effect on the inner system to clear away any high-inclination wannabes in the asteroid belt.
And what about the more exotic models, like early solar systems including a fifth giant planet? It too has an effect on all the resonances, which means that the modern-day asteroid belt may actually be a fossil record, remembering what the young system was like. And the more we study those little leftover asteroids, the more we can learn about our own origins.
Read more: "A record of the final phase of giant planet migration fossilized in the asteroid belt's orbital structure"
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Methane Mystery on Mars May Get a Partial Answer Soon
NASA's Curiosity rover just made some important measurements.
SAN FRANCISCO — NASA's Curiosity rover may have just taken a big step toward cracking at least part of the Mars methane mystery.
Curiosity's measurements show that methane levels cycle seasonally inside the Red Planet's 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater, which the rover has been exploring since August 2012. The six-wheeled robot has also detected several big surges of the gas, which is a possible (though far from definitive) sign of Mars life.
But here's where the mystery comes in: The view from above is very different. The European-Russian Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), which was designed to sniff out low-abundance gases such as methane, has found the Martian air to be virtually free of the stuff.
For example, TGO recorded an upper limit of 0.012 parts per billion (ppb) methane during its first four months of full science operations, which lasted from April through August 2018. That's about 35 times lower than the background methane levels Curiosity measured inside Gale over the same period.
And neither TGO nor Mars Express, a European probe that has been orbiting the planet since December 2003, spotted the most recent methane spike that Curiosity detected. During that event, which occurred on June 19 of this year, methane concentrations at the rover's location rose to a whopping 21 ppb — the highest levels that Curiosity had ever recorded. (Mars Express did, however, independently observe the first methane surge that Curiosity spotted, in June 2013.)
The discrepancy between ground measurements and orbital data has the Curiosity team "mystified, just like everyone else," mission principal investigator Ashwin Vasavada said here last week during a media roundtable at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
Perhaps something in the Martian atmosphere destroys methane very quickly, scrubbing away most of the gas that rises above Curiosity and therefore leaving little for TGO or Mars Express to detect, said Vasavada, who's based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But that's not the only possible explanation.
"Maybe the expansion and contraction of the atmosphere every day from solar heating is responsible," he told Space.com after the roundtable.
Curiosity's previous methane measurements — which the rover makes using its Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM — have been gathered at night, Vasavada said. That's not surprising, considering how busy the rover is during the day studying rocks in minute detail and/or driving across the rugged Red Planet landscape. But it means that Curiosity had sniffed only when the atmosphere was relatively dense and the methane concentrated as a result.
During the day, as the atmosphere expands, the methane becomes more mixed and diffuse — perhaps diffuse enough to explain, at least in part, why the orbiters' observations are so different.
The Curiosity team is testing this idea. Over this past weekend, the rover was scheduled to make its first-ever detailed daytime methane measurement.
"This rare experiment is a chance to get some exciting science observations, but we'll need time after the experiment to analyze the data; we don't expect to have any takeaways right away," science team member Catherine O'Connell, a planetary geologist at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, wrote in a mission update on Friday (Dec. 13).
The results, whatever they may be, will not solve the entire Mars methane mystery, for it's a multilayered one. For example, scientists don't know how the gas was produced. Most of the methane in Earth's air was emitted by living creatures, but the stuff can be created abiotically as well — specifically, by reactions involving hot water and rock.
And even if Mars' methane is biogenic — a very big if — there's no guarantee it's a sign of active life. The gas may have been generated billions of years ago in underground pockets, from which it's now slowly seeping, mission team members have said.
The Curiosity team also recently announced intriguing results about another possible biosignature gas. The rover's measurements show that oxygen levels rise considerably higher than expected in the spring and summer and drop below predicted concentrations during the Gale Crater winter.
"As it always has been, both methane and oxygen are a mystery," Vasavada said during the AGU roundtable. "It's telling us that there's things about the atmosphere that we don't understand. How methane and oxygen are produced, and how they're destroyed — both are not fitting our current models of atmospheric chemistry."
The main goal of Curiosity's $2.5 billion mission involves assessing the habitability of Gale Crater. The rover has already accomplished that objective, finding that Gale hosted a long-lived lake-and-stream system in the ancient past.
Since September 2014, Curiosity has been picking its way up Mount Sharp, the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) mountain that rises from Gale's center, searching for clues about Mars' long-ago transition from a relatively warm and wet world to the cold, dry planet it is today.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now.
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Alien hunters discover 'UFO highway' across AmericaNASA airborne campaign catches the drift of snow water
It's the most wonderful time of the year—the time NASA's SnowEx campaign hits the skies and ground of the world's snowy places, measuring snow properties to understand how much water is contained by each winter's snowfall.
Snow is a vital source of water for drinking, agriculture and electrical power in the western United States and other locations around the world. To know how much water will be available the following spring, water resource managers and hydrologists need to know where snow has fallen, how much there is and how is characteristics change as it melts. Measuring snow water equivalent, or SWE, tells them how much water is contained within the snowpack.
NASA currently has no global satellite mission to track and study SWE. SnowEx's airborne measurements, ground measurements and computer modeling are paving the way for future development of a global snow satellite mission. Here are some things they will be watching for in the 2020 campaign.
In the air …
Snow is challenging to measure because its characteristics change depending on what terrain it falls on, how deep it is and whether it is melting. No one tool or measurement can measure all types of snow all the time, the team said.
"The research gaps in snow remote sensing can be grouped by snow climate classes—tundra snow, snow in forests, snow in maritime areas—and by how snow evolves over time," said Carrie Vuyovich, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and SnowEx 2020's current deputy project scientist. "Different snow characteristics impact the measurements differently."
Tracking snow-water equivalent (SWE) across the season helps hydrologists and water resource managers know what water will be available when it melts in the spring, as well as plan for possible floods or droughts.
"It's not so much the depth of the snow—that's the measure most people are probably familiar with," said Ed Kim, a research scientist at Goddard and SnowEx's former project scientist. "You know, in the winter, if it snows and you've got to shovel your driveway, you want to know how many centimeters of snow you have to shovel. But we're after the water equivalent: How much water that snow represents and what it means for floods and droughts."
The SnowEx airborne campaign will fly radar and lidar (light detection and ranging) to measure snow depth, microwave radar and radiometers to measure SWE, optical cameras to photograph the surface, infrared radiometers to measure surface temperature, and hyperspectral imagers to document snow cover and composition. Some of these instruments work better than others across different types of terrain, vegetation and snow conditions, and seeing where and when each performs best will help snow scientists decide how different combinations of instruments would provide useful measurements for a potential satellite mission.
SnowEx 2020 will first test the instruments near Grand Mesa, Colorado, which includes both flat snow and forest. This year's campaign will also include a time series of flights across Colorado, Utah, Idaho and California as snow melts in the spring, documenting changes between locations and seasons. The team began flights in December 2019 and will finish in May 2020.
"The last campaign was a snapshot in time," said Vuyovich. "We did not see a lot of change in snow conditions over the three-week period in 2017, and some techniques we are interested in use a change detection method."
The time series campaign will test and validate a SWE measurement method using L-band interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), measured with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's UAVSAR instrument.
"The UAVSAR instrument is very reliable—it's flown often for non-snow applications such as deformation of the earth surface after earthquakes or volcanoes," said HP Marshall, an associate professor at Boise State University, Idaho and researcher with the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab, and SnowEx 2020's project scientist. "In our preliminary tests in 2017, we got some pretty promising results that correlate with snow depth and SWE, but there wasn't a very big change, so we couldn't test over a wide range of conditions. In 2020, we will make InSAR measurements weekly to bi-weekly during a time series experiment, from snow-free conditions through transition into the wet spring snowpack."
SnowEx will also test the Snow Water Equivalent Synthetic Aperture Radar and Radiometer (SWESARR). SWESARR was developed at NASA Goddard, and its combination of active and passive microwave measurements allows it to measure characteristics of the snow as well as the soil underneath, which can affect the microwave signal.
SnowEx includes partners from universities, private institutions and other government agencies who bring additional expertise and instruments—such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's airborne gamma instrument and the University of Alabama's FMCW radar. These instruments cannot be used in space, but they will help the snow science community advance their understanding of snow across various conditions.
The team will also compare their data to NASA's ICESat-2 and the European Space Agency's Sentinel 1A and 1B satellites, and high-resolution optical imagery from NASA WorldView and private imaging companies.
… and on the ground
In order to know if their algorithms are accurate, the team also collects data on the ground. SnowEx 2020's ground teams will measure snow depth, density, accumulation layers, temperature, wetness and snow grain size—the size of a typical particle. Measuring these characteristics lets them see how different locations and on-the-ground characteristics impact the airborne data.
This year, real-time computer modeling will be integrated into the campaign as well.
"Our snow modeling group has been working to understand where we see the greatest uncertainty in model simulations of SWE," said Vuyovich. Here, "uncertainty" refers to the range of estimates from a number of simulations. The team assembled a twelve-member ensemble of different models and atmospheric data to simulate nine years' worth of snow seasons across North America, pinpointing areas where uncertainty was highest.
"Evaluating the data real-time will help us understand what is driving the uncertainty." Vuyovich said. "Next, we'll start looking at how assimilating different remote sensing observations can help improve our estimates."
To learn more about NASA's snow research, visit snow.nasa.gov/.
Mexico built on top of this lost city? Thousands of discovered artifacts unfold mystery
10 Facts About the Aztec Empire
The empire of Aztec was formed after the three ruling cities Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopa joined the forces 1428. Tenochtitlan, also known as Mexica-Tenochtitlan, became the most dominant military power and buried all evidence of past civilisations. But after an archaeologist made an unexpected discovery in Mexico it helped to expose an entire lost Aztec city.
In Amazon Prime's recently released series showed how a team of workers came across a gigantic oval stone in 1978 near a cathedral in Tenochtitlan. This finding led the archaeologists to a theory that Mexico city was built on the top of an early Aztec city.
The archaeological finding below Mexico city
The narrator of the series stated that the archaeologist, assigned excavate in this area, was Eduardo Matos Montezuma and from the many relics he discovered, scientists are now able to imagine how the magnificent ancient capital might have looked. He also mentioned that it was the ancient vestiges of Tenochtitlan.
In addition, the narrator said, "The centre of Tenochtitlan was situated between the cathedral and the Palacio Nacional, on the ground plaza of the zocalo, it was mainly a place of worship, full of temples erected on the tops of pyramids with their characteristic steep stairways and colourful wall paintings."
The excavation work was continued for five years and after the completion, 7,000 objects, including sculptures, small artefacts, votive offerings and the skulls of sacrificed victims were discovered from that particular area.
The lost Aztec city
It should be mentioned that the ancient city was located at an elevation of over 6,500 feet and it was surrounded by hills, mountains as well as lakes and was connected to the mainland with many causeways and interlaced with navigable canals. In its prime, the settlement was known as a great metropolis with over 1,200,000 inhabitants.
The archaeologist, Dr Montezum found thousands of relics buried below which allowed him to map the old city, which had many temples dedicated to important gods at the ceremonial centre, Teocalli.
"The most imposing was the Templo Mayor, the religious heart of Tenochtitlan, the destination for pilgrims and home for priests and divinities. Priests were allowed to climb to the top of the pyramid and enter the two temples and on either side of the temple, there were two other sacred constructions dedicated to the Gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca," said the narrator of 'Secrets of Archaeology.'
The lost city structure
It was revealed that the lost city of Aztec, Teocalli had dwellings reserved for those in the priesthood and playgrounds for an Aztec ballgame which had more of spiritual meaning than a sporting one and the priests used to play there.
The archaeologist also found a famous alter of the skulls, called Tzompantli, where the craniums of human sacrifice victims were displayed. As per the experts, religious sacrifices were necessary to seek blessings from deities.
The Aztec Empire
'Aztec' refers to the 'people of Aztlán' and the ancestral home of the Aztecs thought to be in northern Mexico or the southwestern US. In 1426, when the Tepanec ruler died, his son Maxlatzin inherited the throne. He sought to reduce Aztec power but was defeated by the former ally.
The Aztecs didn't directly rule the region in the same way like Romans did. Rather than direct control, they subjugated nearby city-states but left the local rulers in charge, then demanded regular tribute.
It should be mentioned that they used to believe in more than 200 gods, who were divided into groups, such as for the weather, agriculture and warfare.
