The hypothesis of a Russian geologist
In September 2007, a large American research probe went to Mars, which was supposed to land at the North Pole of the Red Planet. This is how the Phoenix project began, the goal of which was to detect water and traces of life on Mars.
At the end of May 2008, the probe landed in the target area, and the station photographed the pools of water created by the ice melting during the operation of the landing engine. After that, the excavator bucket began to rake the soil to analyze the Martian soil and search for traces of life. "Phoenix" relays information to Earth using two probes orbiting Mars.
Of course, American scientists should be congratulated on the successful solution of the most difficult technical problems. But the program of this expensive and complex project, the goal of which is to find water and life on Mars, is surprising. However, the program is doomed to failure, and to put it more bluntly, it is meaningless! The fact is that it is difficult to find a more unsuccessful area for searching for traces of life than the North Pole of Mars, which in winter is covered with a large snow cap, clearly visible when observing through a telescope and larger than a similar white cap at the South Pole.
Even on Earth, finding traces of life at the poles is a very difficult task. If, for example, an unknown alien station takes samples on the ice dome of Antarctica or from the ice of the North Pole, then the conclusion is likely to be simple: "There is no life on this planet!" And in the hot sands of the Sahara, and on the high plateaus of the Pamirs and the Himalayas, aliens are unlikely to find any bacteria. Life on planets is unevenly distributed.
I recall an anecdotal story about how a certain inventor in the USSR really wanted to install on the Lunnik, which subsequently made a soft landing on the Moon, his apparatus for searching for traces of life in the lunar soil. He so persistently persuaded the Korolev of the need for this analysis that Korolev finally said: “Go and first put the equipment in the sands near Baikonur. Let's see what she shows. The equipment showed: there is no life on Earth!
The climate of Mars is much more severe, the temperature at night drops to minus 100 Celsius, living conditions, especially at the poles, are quite unfavorable. But the search for traces of life is well founded. The main thing is to choose a place where to look for them. For example, there is a very interesting area on the Red Planet - the giant Mariner Gorge, which stretches for 4000 km in the equatorial part of the planet. The depth of the gorge reaches 15 kilometers.
This grandiose geological formation arose under the influence of a huge river, which for tens of millions of years eroded the dome-shaped uplift of the relief. The river flowed into a low-lying plain covered with red sand, apparently representing an ice plate in place of a frozen ocean. The gorge has its own microclimate: it is relatively warm here, during the day the temperature rises to +30 Celsius. The density of the atmosphere is much higher here. On the slopes of the gorge, giant landslides are visible of thawing loose soil, apparently consolidated with ice. This means that streams flow at the bottom of the gorge in the daytime, lakes with water appear. It is here that one must look for life, if it is still preserved.
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After landing on Mars, the American space station, the media constantly report "sensational information" from the surface of the Red Planet. However, it is difficult to call this information sensational, since it largely only repeats the data obtained by the automatic stations Viking-1 and Viking-2 more than 30 years ago when photographing the surface of Mars and chemical analysis of rocks.
Even then, the photographs showed layered strata of sedimentary rocks deposited in the reservoirs of the Red Planet. Chemical analyzes gave the composition of deep rocks - basalts and sedimentary, consisting of sulfates, chlorides, clays, iron oxides. The current "sensations" of "Phoenix" can only be understood as an attempt to justify the expenses of American taxpayers.
Planet of frozen rivers
The Americans consider the discovery of traces of water on Mars a sensation. In our opinion, the real scientific discovery of water took place back in 1975, when the Vikings photographed a perfectly preserved river network with well-developed river terraces. On the banks of the huge rivers, a series of terraces were visible, which indicated an abundance of water and a consistent decrease in the basis of erosion, i.e., the level below which the rivers cannot deepen their channel.
The lower basis of river erosion corresponds to the low-lying plains of Mars, covered with a thick layer of red sand and sand dunes of a kilometer height. Apparently, deeply frozen oceans of the Red Planet are hidden under the layer of sand.
The excellent preservation of the river valleys indicates that these rivers dried up relatively recently, apparently due to the onset of a sharp cold snap, similar to the Ice Age on Earth. Therefore, finding traces of water does not look like a sensation. There is a lot of water on Mars, it's just in the form of ice.
Another thing is surprising: having received really sensational data from the "Vikings" many years ago, American scientists did not pay enough attention to them. After all, photographs and chemical analyzes are only primary information, which acquires meaning only after its comprehension. In fact, even then it became possible to decipher the geological history of Mars and reveal evidence of truly tragic events that occurred on this planet.
American scientists, like science fiction writers of the past centuries, continue to call river valleys "canals". They photographed grandiose many kilometers of landslides on the steep slopes of the Mariner Gorge, but did not seem to understand that this is evidence of the thawing of a thick layer of loose red sands cemented by ice permafrost. Fascinated by the search for traces of water, American scientists overlooked that landslides in the Mariner Gorge indicate a warming of the climate of the Red Planet, and that this process is similar to the global warming of the Earth, which began 18 thousand years ago with the end of the last ice age.
But if the permafrost thaws on two planets at the same time, it means that the reasons for climate warming are associated with the increased radiation of the Sun, and not with the widely advertised technogenic carbon dioxide emissions and the "greenhouse effect".
How Mars turned red
Another sensation, also not understood by American scientists, is the magnetism of red sands that arose due to the weathering of deep rocks. The presence of iron oxides was assumed on Mars before, but no one knew that a rare mineral maghemite on Earth, a red magnetic iron oxide (gamma-Fe2O3), is widespread here. And again, American scientists did not give an explanation for this sensational fact, the unusualness of which is that when weathered rocks on Earth, not maghemite appears, but non-magnetic iron hydroxide - the mineral limonite.
Artificial maghemite - a red magnetic iron oxide, a storage medium on magnetic tapes - is obtained in factories by calcining iron hydroxide at 1000 degrees Celsius. We managed to find natural maghemite in large quantities in Yakutia, in the impact zone of the giant Popigai meteorite crater, which arose 35 million years ago. In our opinion, maghemite of Yakutia arose due to the calcination of ancient hydroxide weathering crusts during an asteroid impact. So, it is quite possible that the maghemite red sands of Mars arose due to the calcination of limonite crusts of the weathering of basalts during asteroid impacts, which left many huge explosive craters.
Red-colored ferruginous weathering crusts appear due to deep rocks only if free oxygen is present in the planet's atmosphere in combination with water. But oxygen is unusually active, and just like that it cannot exist. Therefore, free oxygen in the atmosphere of any planet is a clear indicator of the process of photosynthesis and the presence of life.
According to our calculations, in order for Mars to turn red and the basalts of its surface "rusted" over many millions of years to a depth of one kilometer, it was necessary to remove 5,000 trillion tons of free oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, which is four times more than the amount of oxygen currently contained in the atmosphere Earth.
Such a huge amount of free oxygen in the atmosphere of Mars could only be created by life. Let me remind you that the green cover of the Earth creates 1200 trillion tons of oxygen in our earth's atmosphere in just 3700 years, which, according to geological concepts, is an insignificant period.
How life died on Mars
We can say: if the black basalts of the planet "rusted" from the surface and turned into powerful red-colored weathering crusts, then there was undoubtedly life on Mars! It has existed for billions of years and was clearly associated with photosynthesis, that is, with vegetation. Otherwise, Mars would not have become the "Red Planet". Traces of life will definitely be found. The question must be posed differently: why did this life disappear?
The essence of our hypothesis is that the satellites of Mars Phobos and Deimos (Fear and Terror) rotate extremely close to the surface of the planet. For example, Phobos, a typical asteroid 25 km long and 21 km wide, is in a ring orbit just 5,920 km from the planet's surface. It is gradually slowed down by the rare atmosphere of Mars and approaches the so-called Roche limit, that is, the distance at which the satellite is destroyed by gravitational-tidal forces and, in the presence of traces of the atmosphere, falls onto the planet.
For Mars, the Roche limit is 4900 km from its surface. Astronomers believe that in 40 million years Phobos will descend so much that it will also fall apart into many debris and collapse to Mars.
In our opinion, Mars had a third moon that had already passed the Roche limit and disintegrated into thousands of debris, perhaps less than a million years ago. The fact that the catastrophe on Mars occurred in a geological sense recently is evidenced by the fresh forms of meteorite craters and a well-preserved river network, not covered by powerful sandstorms that rage on Mars for months.
For the companion - the killer of life, we suggest the name Thanatos (Death). Thanatos was inhibited by the powerful and oxygen-rich atmosphere of Mars, extending up to 5,000 km from its surface.
Debris from Thanatos collapsed onto the planet, creating numerous large meteorite craters. Curiously, the craters are oriented on the surface of Mars, like traces of machine-gun bursts. This means that at the Roche limit, Thanatos debris formed "swarms" that fell sequentially one after another.
A terrible asteroid bombardment ignited the planet's surface and turned non-magnetic iron hydroxide into magnetic maghemite. Iron hydroxide is often accompanied by aluminum hydroxide, which, when calcined, transforms into aluminum oxide, a corundum mineral, second only to diamond in hardness. It can be predicted that the hardest rock "emery", consisting of corundum grains, will be found on Mars.
The gravitational field of Mars is noticeably weaker than that of the Earth. Therefore, the dense atmosphere of Mars was easily ripped off the planet and thrown into space in the form of powerful streams of incandescent gas and plasma, in which the speed of motion of atoms and ions exceeds the third cosmic speed. The loss of the atmosphere led to a sharp cooling - the ice age came, the oceans and rivers froze.
However, the atmosphere of Mars, which is 95% carbon dioxide, has an ozone layer and contains 0.1% oxygen. The mystery is that this oxygen can be either relict, or … these are traces of the activity of plant life such as mosses and lichens, preserved at the bottom of the Mariner Gorge in the equatorial (warmest) part of Mars. It was here that a station had to be planted to search for Martian life.
A million years is enough to turn Mars into a lifeless cold desert with dry riverbeds and frozen seas covered with red ferruginous magnetic sand. But does anyone on Earth remember that only six thousand years ago, on the site of the dead Sahara desert, high-water rivers flowed, forests rustled and life was in full swing?
A. M. Portnov, Doctor of Geology and Mineralogy, Professor