Efrain Palermo wrote:-

Hello Dr. Hoffman,



I was looking forward to seeing you at the Mars Society Convention, especially as you were schedule right before my presentation.

I would like to see what you make of the seep clustering, irregardless of the method of propagation of these 'seeps' phenonmenon, there is a thread to follow on the strange geographic location clusters.

There was a presenter (who spoke in lieu of your slot) who presented real laboratory experiments which showed that the triple point of water under Martian conditions still left room for liquid water formation, and the sublimation stage did not occur instantly.

Is water behind these proposed seepages? I cannot state this as a fact, but...I would like NASA/JPL to focus some attention onm these flows in their upcoming Odyssey mission and settle the question.

Thank you for taking the time to look over our thesis.

Sincerely,

Efrain Palermo


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Hi Efrain, nice to see you here on the board.

Sorry I didn't make it to the Mars Society conference, but I was running out of babysitting credits after 3 weeks in the States.

I would be interested in discussing the distribution of dark streaks with you, to see if it is a selection effect or a real attribute of the data. It is certainly an interesting clustering that I need to think about.

You are, however, definitely missing a number of occurrences of dark streaks in association with gullies. This suggests that your map is incomplete in some regards.

As for water, of course it is stable for short periods of time on Mars. Mike Hecht, amongst others, has been saying this for several years. The difficulty is getting those conditions to combine with a source of H2O.

Most of the gullies and dark streaks are at too high an altitude to stabilise liquid water, so one would expect a very rapid freeze-out of the water, followed by slow sublimation (my previous post suggested hours for the former and days to months for the latter, not the years that we in fact observe for the dark streaks).

You need to be very specific which bit of Mars you are talking about. For instance, ice is stable in some regions of the Earth, but I don't see any out of my window right now, and haven't for a year or more. So with water on Mars. It clearly exists at depth in the regolith. It may be temporarily stable or metastable in some places on the surface, but those places are exactly the ones from which water will be removed over long cold millenia by the process of dessication and cold-trapping.

Unless you can prove a source of groundwater, then we don't have anything, and I don't see that you have proved that yet with your article.

You can, however, rest assured that NASA is frantically keen to find liquid water on Mars, and is sending a number of expensive instruments to the planet over the next few years, explicitly for that purpose. They don't need encouraging, more's the pity! ;-(

The Mars Observer has yet another Thermal IR instrument trying to find the elusive carbonates that aren't there (IMNSHO), and a low-resolution gamma/neutron spectrometer that will tell us about regional distribution of elements, including the hydrogen that should be in the water that isn't there either. (ice doesn't count, of course)

(I have a large serve of humble pie set aside in case either carbonates or liquid water are found. Indeed, I would be very happy to be proven wrong and find that Mars is more than a planet of dreams, dust, and illusions.) :-)

As I mentioned, I'm happy to continue this dialogue with you either privately or publicly, here or elsewhere.

- Nick