<http://whitemars.com

Got myself a domain name to go with the concept, although the pages are still hosted by the University of Melbourne.

What do I have to say about the latest developments?

The "Lakes" paper isn't really anything new. It documents flow of fluids, but doesn't show what the fluids were, so no change to the status quo ante.

However, today's (almost) no CO2 in the polecaps is a very interesting development. This has been coming for a while, but it raises interesting implications.:-

It's quite an issue - although we have known for decades (from D/H ratio) that Mars has lost a lot of its H2O, what is far more significant is the "missing" CO2. We haven't found any surface carbonates, and there doesn't seem to be enough in the polecaps, so where is it?

One option is clathrates in the polecaps or near-polar regolith. Alternatively, subsurface carbonate formation at depths of many km below a frozen surface layer may be a way of forming hidden carbonate rock. If enough CO2 is sequestered in these forms, then you can have an early "warm" Mars .

CO2 may also have been lost in the gaseous phase from an early atmosphere by atmospheric erosion in giant impacts, but to square the balance of water, we require the planet to have been so cold at the time that all the surface water was frozen - a "White" Mars.

Or, there may never have been much CO2, in which case the putative Warm and Wet early Mars is an impossible fiction and again we have a cold dry "White" Mars, but a CO2-poor one.