The struggle between those who seem to seek a "dead Mars" and those intent on finding a "living Mars" has been going on for generations.

The planet itself is enigmatic, providing no certain answer to advocates of any current state. In fact the planet provides constant contradictory evidence, to the point where it is quite capable of driving its observers nearly mad.

A thick, rigid crust under the north pole may or may not be all that significant. There is some evidence that the location of the poles has varied rather wildly over the course of the planet's history, and if the current readings are reliable, the present polar locations may only date a few million years in the past, very recent in areological time.

What accounts for those wandering poles? At one time, the suggestion was made that perhaps the entire crust -- rigid and thick though it may be -- slipped over the mesosphere. The Tharsis Bulge itself may have originated at a pole. And for what it's worth, the volcanoes on Tharsis were apparently active not all that long ago, though how long ago it was is impossible to say with any certainty.

A thick and rigid crust may or may not imply a "dead" planet. Applying terrestrial standards to Mars has been the downfall of one after another planetological theory. Mars is Mars. It's self-evident, but it needs to be repeated.

Nick's contributions to understanding what's going on there shouldn't be underestimated. A major contribution to that understanding is Nick's insight that Mars has always been cold, that there never really was a "warm and wet" phase that used to be touted among so many planetologists. It may be that the surface of Mars is only now warming up. While there is still a great deal of discussion around the topic of surface and near-surface water on Mars, Nick pointed out quite some time ago that it is far more likely for any surface fluid (even temporary) to be more like battery acid than any kind of water we would recognize as a happy home for biology.

Yet we still know next to nothing about whether or not there is biology on Mars, and we know very little more about how the planet works. Lots of hints and indications, but as we've seen again and again, nothing is quite what it seems to be on Mars.

It is a planet of constant deception.

So I wouldn't draw any conclusions from the MRO findings, any more than I drew conclusions from the first astonishing revelations of what that Meridiani white stuff and dark stuff really was. We still don't know quite how it got there, do we...