Yesterday I posted an article I wrote about spheres with stems, and the problems with Nasa’s interpretations with cross bedding, as the two subjects were “linked.”
About an hour later, Nasa came up with a new press release in which they stated that the spherules at Fram were different than those at Eagle in that they had stems attached to them. They gave no additional information, other than that they studiously avoided them because they slow down the grinding of the Rat. While I realize this is a highly pro Nasa board site, and I risk offending people here, I am pro Nasa too, but I want them to do the best science possible, and this article is highly critical of their interpretations. I find it odd that they are so confidant in their analysis of these extraordinary spheres as being so conclusively concretions, that they show no desire to study them further, and now even admit to avoiding them. It seems they are more interested sometimes in setting records than in scientific inquiry. Since my links did not work, I am reposting this article, slightly reworked.

Spheres with stems at Eagle Crater:
This image of the rock Last Chance shows an example of one of the spheres that seems attached to a stem. It is near the right side, just at half way down. The shadow under it shows how long and narrow the attachment is. There seem to be others behind it that are similar.
Last Chance
Here we see some other spheres with stems that were almost run over. It looks like they escaped between the treads, while near the lower left corner are two very good examples. There are at least 6 spheres with stems visible on this lower rock, noticeable by the elevated shadows.

Here they don’t stick up so much and look like embryos or pollywogs.

Problems with the cross bedding interpretations:
The next image illustrates some of the difficulty in interpreting this fine scale bedding. The middle rock has some higher angle exposure of the fine beds. Like the lines of a contour map, which never actually cross, the lines merge together at the cliff face, where the exposure is at 90 degrees to the bedding plane, or "vertical", and we are looking down at it from above. Each layer can be traced out, and they do not actually merge or "cross". It is clearer to speak about the Normal tangent to the bedding plane, and in order to properly see the bedding, the surface exposure needs to be parallel to the Normal, and the eye of the observer in the plane of the bedding. These conditions were not met very frequently, as the camera angles were mostly from above.
The lower rocks in the picture (Slickrock) have an exposure that is closer to being parallel to the bedding plane. There we can see that slight changes in the slope of the exposure cause the bedding lines to diverge and converge wildly. Dips and slight elevations in the rock surface even produce concentric patterns in the bedding, like a contour map of a hill, because the bedding is so thin, parallel, and flat. This causes it to resemble the complex grain of wood. I think it is clear that these ripply looking lines are not ripples. Some of the examples that Nasa used to demonstrate cross bedding and ripples were exactly this, and I was a bit astounded and disappointed that the level of geologic knowledge being displayed here was this lacking. No doubt there was some current flowing here, but I want good evidence, not grasping at straws.
Groovy Ripples

Lichens? On the rocks:
Here is a pic which shows the lichen like features. There is a cracked off piece of rock on the lower right half of the image. At the top of this piece, just under a small overhanging hook in the upper center of the image is a patch of dark, globular and filamentous pieces that appear to be attached to the rock. They occur in many places here at Last Chance, but I thought this location was the best representation. The surface there is near vertical, to beyond vertical, I believe, so these are not just a patch of adhering soil particles, though that is a possibility. It seems that the soil too is composed in part of these odd looping structures. There is a spot farther left where one of these complete loops can be seen on the rock tightly encircling a bump. This gave the appearance of in situ growth to me. The resolution is only just enough to see these, and it helps in this darker image to turn up the monitor brightness.
Lost Lichens?

Anomalous Bedding:
The next image again shows the rock Last Chance up close. Many linear segmented structures can be seen partly eroded out, especially in the upper part of the image. These go in all directions, but tend to be mostly "flat" lying. These intertwined filaments, possibly a fossil algae, slime, or linear precipitate, form a complex network within the rock. Any way you break this rock, you would see what you might believe is bedding or cross bedding, when in fact it is not beds, but linear and intertwined features only generally arranged as a bed and aligned along the principal current direction. This is what I have refered to as "anomalous" bedding. This rock is much different than the well formed flat layers of the previous example, and I would interpret that it did form with more current present, and would most likely represent fossilized algal mats. Perhaps each mat layer represents a diurnal cycle of growth during the day at the surface, and sinking to the bottom in the cold nights. I hypothesized that the blueberries might be concretions that formed in this mat with wave agitation at the surface providing the minerals and insuring spherical growth, while the eventual sinking would prevent almost all of them from growing any larger, thus producing the highly unusual and skewed size distribution as is seen. However, to some degree in this image, and more so in others, it can be seen that these filaments grade into small spheres, just like small "blueberries". This suggests much more than just a casual relationship between the spheres and segmented filaments.
This image also shows fairly clearly in the upper right more of the putative "lichens" with their looping growth encircling around bumps as well as forming dark globules and short threads on the surface.

This image is just a bit to the right of the previous image. It is in the exact same spot as Nasa's annotated example of cross bedding. The upper part of the image has a series of small pockets outlined by the segmented filaments. One of the filaments can be seen in a roughly circular cross section at the top edge middle of the image. The larger pocket just below this (which has the loopy lichens) is what Nasa has delineated as a migrating ripple sediment lense with cross bedding on its right margin. That looks OK in their press image, on a larger scale, but here we see that the right margin of this pocket does not contain cross bedding, but a stack of 4 segmented filaments. This is the point of the right yellow arrow in the press image (linked next). Where is the cross of the cross bedding?
Third Last Chance
The Press Image

The lower red arrow of the press image is supposed to show ripple cross lamination. Look closely at the pan cam shot linked to above as "Attached spheres:". In that image, from a higher angle, you can see that there may not be any actual crossing, just that the rock is eroded farther back in some places, while other layers stick out more. The press release has a big work up on this same spot with a 3-D visualization, but this does little for me to clarify this. At best, it is a terrible example of a ripple, and where are the other ripples? This is not the regularity that rippled or cross bedded rock looks like. In many images, where it looks like there may be some cross bedding, closer examination shows that there are these segmented filaments that branch, or more frequently, cross over each other. Cross bedding should only rarely form a cross, but frequently show the merging of layers, and here, we see the opposite. These segmented filaments are harder, so they often form the leading edge of apparent, or actual layers.

At the Upper Dells rock, are we looking down at the side of many flat bedding layers? Or, are we looking at the actual bedding plane itself, covered in mostly parallel segmented filaments? The pancam picture (I think this is it)

of this rock somewhat supports the later hypothesis. Aren’t those thin layers that have flaked off parallel to the surface of the ground? Couldn’t that be the bedding, not these fine striations? That could be why this rock and Slickrock are still so flat after millions of years of fine wind erosion. It would be pretty unusual for a soft layered rock presumably sitting on its edge with the layers tilted up to erode so uniformly and remain flat, wouldn't it? I interpret these as something like stromatolites. The algal filaments may have been bottom growing with enough slight current to keep them aligned as they were deposited, more so at Slickrock, and less so at Dells. I’m not saying that I am correct about these two particular rocks, just that I urge caution in the interpretation, and one needs to see more than just one side of a rock to make a well founded claim about its 3 dimensional structure.

Upper Dells:

Slickrock “Area”:
Slickrock Flat
Slickrock:
Too Slick</a? I dispute every claim Nasa makes in the interpretation of this rock. All that they refer to is just changes in angle and depth of the surface in a very thin, almost perfectly flat layered rock. Occasionally some layers stick out farther, overlapping those below, which can give an appearance of truncation, or “cross bedding.” A close look at the pancam shot ( Groovy Ripples) linked above shows that most every layer can be tracer out completely, and where they cant be seen, there is still space for them to be there underneath. There is no clear evidence for their claims A: Scour surface, B: Teepee structure, C: Ripples and cross lamination, and D: Ripple trough. And as far as their claim in the press release “The central unit is dominated by fine, parallel stratification, which could have been produced by wind-blown ripples… “ well, when have windblown ripples ever produced fine parallel FLAT layers? Maybe on a flat Earth! Am I the only one who sees a deep hole here? They seem to be trying to force the evidence to fit a predetermined conclusion of shallow deposition, but it doesn’t fit. They have velocity and direction vectors based on nada.