February 18, 2002

In addition to examining some of the claims made here :

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2002/pdf/program.pdf

You also need to respond to the following observations. If water cut all those channels (basically a given) then where did the water come from, and where did it go? One answer to these questions is that it came from the northern ocean, was transported onto the highland crust by impacts, volcanism, and the atmospheric and meteorological phenomena associated with these processes, it was melted out of these dirty, rocky and muddy glacial plates by these same processes, and internal heat, until the entire process come to a slow grinding halt, some time in the recent past, the remnents of which are what we observe in the MGS photos today.

One obvious conclusion to this scenario, easily supported by the visual evidence, is that many of the glacial plates involved in these global water transport processes still exist today, frozen in place, but not entirely, just waiting for a large impact, renewed volcanism or high obliquity, to temporarily enrich the atmosphere enough to start the hydrogeological transport process moving again.

There you have it.

Thomas Lee Elifritz
lifeform@atlantic.net
http://www.atlantic.net/~elifritz