Adventure at Pueblo Shé

Map of (some of) the ruins at Pueblo Shé. Nels Nelson, 1914 

Up the road apiece, past the Zorro Ranch and over the ridge into the Galisteo Basin, the vast acreage of the Singleton holdings goes on for miles and miles. The Singleton ranches have various names. I forget most of them, but all along the route north almost to the village of Galisteo, the red and white painted gates sport the Bar-S brand signifying yet more of the Singleton properties.

Up over a hill past the Anaya Ranch, and across the road from Tom Ford's 20,000+ acre Cerro Pelon Ranch, is a gate that is sometimes open -- say when a movie is being shot on the land (part of Hostiles was) or cattle are being driven, or once when I saw a cowboy hauling bales of hay for the horses.

June 2,  the gate was open and we turned in, waving at the dudes by the gate -- "Just follow the road" they said, a dirt track really, but not in bad shape despite the rain the day before. 

We were on our way to Pueblo Shé. The weather was distinctly cool and foggy and threatened more rain, but we didn't much care. It seemed like a good day to go exploring on forbidden land, this place now called San Cristobal Ranch, yet another of the Singleton family properties in New Mexico. They have ranches all over the west, and in the Galisteo Basin, big ranches are liable to host one or more Pueblo Indian ruins, and the ruins can be enormous. Pueblo Shé is one of the bigger ones.

We jounced along the dirt road around curves and up hills and down, past log cabin ruins that were used in the filming of Hostiles and maybe some other pictures, too. We kept going and going, close  to arroyos and stands of cholla and piñon pine until we came to a series of tents and lots of cars and cattle lowing in the distance. This was the place. We would be joining perhaps two hundred others going to the ruins in small groups led by volunteer archaeologists, each of whom had their take on where we were and what it meant in the vast eternal scheme of New Mexico's long habitation by its varied populations.

Our group was an early morning one, and we set out relatively promptly once everyone on the list was assembled. We were warned by our tour leader that the hike would be about two miles some of which would be fairly strenuous, but accommodation would be made for those who might be slower than others. We could expect to be out exploring for about two hours. We should be prepared for rain.

I looked around and it seemed to me pretty much all the dozen or so in our group were in their 70s and a few were even older. There was one young fellow, Paul D., who was one of three archaeologists in our group. He said he was with the City of Santa Fe, and he'd never been to Pueblo Shé before -- well, except for the previous Friday when the volunteers were taken around . None of the archaeologists had. Not even our tour leader, John W., had been there before last Friday. It was to be a new adventure to all of us. Access was so restricted that the ruins hadn't really been investigated or excavated for more than 100 years.

Ms. Ché and I had brought our walking sticks so the first part of our trek up hill from the tent encampment was... OK. The ground was rough and dotted with snake holes and cow-pies, but this was no great problem. We noticed right away pot sherds on the ground. Lots and lots of them. We climbed a slight rise and John W. explained it was one of the trash middens left by the peoples who had occupied Pueblo Shé, and he said that as far as anybody knew the site had been "de-populated" and abandoned sometime after 1500 but before the Spanish arrived (starting with Coronado in 1540). Why it was abandoned was a mystery, but several of the pueblos in the Galisteo Basin were abandoned about the same time, and a theory was that there was an extended drought, and the populations of abandoned pueblos migrated to other pueblos or areas where water remained accessible and available. Perhaps.

John also said that it wasn't entirely clear who had lived at Pueblo Shé. There were a number of different Native kin and language groups who lived in the Galisteo Basin over time, and every indication was that these groups mixed and mingled and there was no way to say that this group or that were the exclusive residents of any one pueblo. John was convinced that pueblo populations were always mixed throughout time as they are today.

What we saw on the ground was an indication of the complexity of the site. There were hundreds -- thousands -- of pottery sherds, many of them highly and finely made and decorated. Other household objects had been retrieved from the trash middens and from the nearby room blocks, one of which was our next destination.

Climbing a low mound, we looked down into a squarish pit. "What do you suppose this is," asked John. Some of us said a kiva. Nope, wrong answer. No, this was one of the excavations made at the site by Nels Nelson in 1914, the only real archaeological excavation that had ever been done there.

Nelson excavated approximately twenty rooms and a few kivas at Pueblo Shé, ran a trench through a trash midden, collected lots of things and shipped them off to AMNH New York where they still are, stored in boxes out of sight, and that was that. He went on to his next excavation and recovery site in the Galisteo Basin and eventually went far beyond. Nelson is credited with refining if not originating stratigraphic excavation and interpretation of archaeological sites, techniques he practiced at Pueblo Shé and elsewhere in the region.

Nelson determined that there were more than 1500 rooms on the ground floor of this pueblo complex. There are 7 main buildings at Pueblo Shé arranged in rows facing south. Several have wings facing east/west. There is also a detached section that we would visit. It appears to have been started but never completed. It's as if the footings or foundation had been laid but no superstructure had been built.

Like most of the rest of the pueblos in the Galisteo Basin, Pueblo Shé had been built of puddled adobe interspersed with local stone. The adobe had melted away while the stone had tumbled to the ground. Nothing was left of the pueblo but scattered squarish stones and low mounds. But the shape and extent of the buildings was easy enough to trace on the ground. Each mound was several hundred feet long, forty or fifty feet wide, and most buildings had probably not been more than two stories high. One building, which we would explore late in the tour, had left a taller mound, quite steep to climb, a mound that John W. said indicated at least three storeys and possibly more.

Some of us noticed right away that there were no vigas in the ruins, nor any sign that there ever had been any. Vigas are cross beams, usually ponderosa pine in Northern New Mexico, that are used as roofing beams and floor beams of multi-storey buildings. Their apparent absence at Pueblo Shé was interesting to some of us. Had there never been any? If not, how were the buildings roofed? If so, then where did they come from and what had become of them? Toward the end of the tour, John W. suggested the vigas would have to have come from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains some distance away and they might have been taken and recycled at other pueblos after Pueblo Shé was abandoned, as was the rule for valuable and not easily replace lumber not only prior to the arrival of the Spanish but since then too.

After checking out several of the building mounds and some Spanish era foundations that John W. said was likely a colonial era house (and someone on the tour suggested might have been a chapel), we headed off to a hill overlooking the ruins.

The approach was not particularly steep, but once we got near the top, the climb became rocky and precipitous. We were expected to 'summit' -- and it was clear there was no way I would be able to do so. John warned the group "You may have to do some scrambling" and most were able to make the steep and slippery climb to the top, though one lost her shoe, and several slid down before they figured out a way up.

I stayed behind with Paul D. who was kind enough to share pictures he'd taken at the top on Friday. There were petroglyphs. Not a lot of them. Two large ones only. He asked me what I thought one of them was. I said it was an antelope. He said that's what he thought too, but he was told it was a macaw or a parrot, very exotic birds in this area, as they could only have come from Mexico or Central America. Images of macaws are not rare in New Mexico, however, regardless of how rare the birds may or may not have been.

The other petroglyph I thought was a turtle or tortoise. Paul D. said it wasn't clear to him what it was. I've since done some research and realized that what I thought might be a tortoise was probably a representation of a pueblo resident protected by a large oval shield. These representations are found in many locations in the Galisteo Basin. On our way to the base of the summit, we'd both noticed a large flat-faced boulder on which was carefully pecked the letter "A".

 It wasn't too long before the group that had clamored up the sheer rock face to the top of the hill started picking their way down on a less steep path and we headed off to the next destination.

Little did we know what a challenge it would be. Remember, this was a group of mostly elderly people, spry though most might have been. John W. (no spring chicken himself) wanted to show us something he thought was vitally important. And getting there would take some doing, specifically climbing down into and then up the other side of a deep and steep-sided arroyo. OK, then.

Mars Water, Hmph.

I haven't written much about my favorite extraterrestrial planet Mars in quite a while -- primarily because there's not been much to say about it for quite a number of years. The problem -- at least in my estimation -- is the real reluctance of the planetary science community to go against established "knowledge" as promulgated by the Big Men of the Field. This has been true for decades, and one can assume it will be true for the foreseeable future.

But in advance of the release of the new Ridley Scott film, "The Martian," word comes that "flowing water" has been found and confirmed on the surface of Mars. Uhhh. Well....

Sure. Why not?

The streaks that have given rise to the current findings have been known and noted for nearly 20 years, and the "discovery" that they are presently active has been recognized for almost as long. The problem has been that their cause is mystifying. Because of a long-time consensus among researchers that the surface of Mars is too cold and the atmosphere is too thin for liquid water to exist at all, research tended to discount the notion that the streaks (known as linea) were the result of flowing water, or if they were that the water which made them had flowed recently -- which could be any time within the last few million years.

This tendency to discount what seems so obvious has been strong among Mars researchers for many a long year, and it continues today.

The idea that water can -- and does -- currently flow at the surface of Mars, at least intermittently, is still regarded with some suspicion. The idea that other substances may be liquid and flow at current Martian surface temperatures and pressures is generally dismissed entirely.

Myself, I was once a fairly strong advocate of current surface water on Mars as it seemed to me that the visual evidence* of what appeared to be geysers, springs, flows and so on was too strong to be ignored, yet it was ignored. Or the evidence was interpreted so as to preclude water or any other flowing liquid.
(* link is to a site which hosts thousands of images of the Martian surface acquired by the Mars Global Surveyor between 1997 and 2003, images that I and many others scoured intensely as they were posted for various interesting features, including streaks and other signs of current flows.)

After a time, I began to think about other volatiles on the surface that could mimic water -- look just like water but not be water and act almost identically under the current surface conditions.... what substance could do that?

It occurred to me that an aqueous solution of sulfuric acid -- which is stable in liquid form down to around -63C and .05mb atmospheric pressure -- would be an ideal candidate. It would appear to be liquid water, and it would act just like liquid water (apart from its solvent qualities), but it would not be liquid water. It would be battery acid. There would be no easy way to tell from a distance (such as an orbiting satellite or from Earth) just what the substance was. The only chemical difference between sulfuric acid and water is the presence of a sulfur atom and three additional oxygen atoms.

But at the time I was proposing sulfuric acid as a potential surface fluid on Mars, the consensus was that the likeliest fluid -- if there were current fluid flows -- would be water, probably water heavy with salt. Well, it would have to be because only brines can sustain a liquid phase under current Martian surface conditions. Even then, the period of liquid phase would tend to be brief unless the salt content was high.

When the Phoenix Lander exposed a patch of ice directly under the craft, the water scenario brightened considerably. Ice would indicate fresh water (although a brine could freeze at low enough temperatures). But there was a puzzlement: droplets of some fluid appeared -- and stayed -- on the landing struts for quite some time. It was at first assumed that these droplets were water liberated from the ice below by the heat of the retro rockets as the craft landed. But how could it be? The droplets were in shadow, and the temperature in shadow was well below the freezing point of even brines. These droplets appeared to remain liquid for... days, weeks, months. The atmospheric pressure was also low enough that when patches of ice were exposed during digging efforts they sublimated directly into gas once exposed to the air and sunlight. There was no observable liquid phase -- to water ice.

Some other fluid must have been seen on those landing struts, but what? It almost certainly wasn't water.

As analysis continued, salts were observed in the soil, one of the most interesting being perchlorate, used as a cleaning solvent on Earth. It was speculated that perchlorate in solution with water would produce a brine which could withstand surface conditions and remain liquid, and potentially, it could harbor microbial life.

This was actually a quite radical departure from previous "knowledge" about the surface of Mars. After the ambiguous life-detection results of the Viking Landers (c. 1976) a theory got going that suggested that the surface was sterile, and it was sterilized by a combination of some sort of hyper-oxide in the soil (substances which have never been observed) and the ultraviolet flux from the sun which is unimpeded by the Martian atmosphere. This theory was maintained for many years, and proposed that not only was the surface sterile, but it would be lethal to any living thing, including you and me. Simply breathing Mars dust might well be enough to kill you.

I never believed it, but it was the standard model of Mars for many years.

Just as a blood-red surface and brilliant orange-red sky were standard for so long. Though they were false renderings made for publicity, they remained the most frequently seen images of the Martian surface for decades despite repeated calls from the public for more accurate renderings.

The streaks that have caused all the buzz were first seen in the Mars Global Surveyor images in the late 1990s, though there were hints of them long before that. While much of the surface of Mars appears to be static -- except for dust storms and occasional small impacts -- there are areas that demonstrate considerable activity, including dust devils, some features that may be fluid geysers, active sand geysers, snow fall at and near the poles, possible glaciers, apparently explosive deflation of hillsides, land slides, and these streaks. They're found mostly in mid latitudes and equatorial areas mostly along the rims of craters and cliff faces. They tend to be a good deal darker than the surrounding terrain, but in some cases, they are quite a bit lighter. They have been observed to grow quite long and then they stop. Typically they fade away after a few months, and frequently they reappear in the same general areas once the surface temperatures warm up. Usually, they are seen when surface temperatures are between 250K and 300K -- in other words, somewhat cooler than to well above the melting point of pure water ice.

While it seemed possible to those with open minds that these streaks were the result of some kind of water flows, it was very difficult, indeed nearly impossible, to prove. Liquid water could not flow or persist at the Martian surface for any length of time because the temperature and pressure were in most places too low for too long. Thus even if there had been flowing water at the surface in the past, it would have been temporary unless the temperatures and atmospheric pressures were a good deal higher than they are today.

I'm one of those who tends to think that Mars is currently in a warm period, perhaps the warmest it's experienced in the planet's history. I doubt there was ever a warmer and wetter past, and I doubt there was ever an ocean as we would know one. There may have been a relatively heavy ice cover in some -- or many -- areas and there may have been intermittent lakes in many areas. But such water (or other fluid) which appeared at the surface for however long it may have done so came from below in almost every case.

Including those streaks. One of the problems with understanding them is that in most cases they begin at or very near the tops of crater rims and cliff faces. In many cases, their origin is a point source, really undetectable at the resolution of orbiting cameras, so it's impossible to tell just what the source of these streaks is. Somehow the fluid, whatever fluid it is, has to get up to the highest surface level before flowing downslope, sometimes for a kilometer or more.

I've often wondered why the streaks begin at the tops of cliff faces or crater rims rather than taking the easy route and forming at the bottoms where the fluid -- whatever it is -- might pool and be detected as a lake or pond even if ice covered for much of the time.

Actually, there are indications that that happens in various places at various times, but those who study the streaks don't seem to pay much attention to the indications of current ponds and lakes... ah, the division of labor...

Still, there is no explanation for the origin of the streaks at the tops of crater rims and cliff faces rather than their bottoms. The mechanism is thought to be hydrologic pressure from below which could be due to almost anything, Exactly why it manifests where and how it does remains a mystery.

The notion is that the streaks are underlain with a layer of permanent ice and that the flowing water which makes the streaks visible runs over the ice when temperatures at the surface are high enough. Interestingly, atmospheric pressure doesn't seem to play much of a role in the presence or absence of streaks, it's all about latitude and temperature.

There have been indications for many years that much of the surface of Mars is underlain with ice, not solely near the poles where it was expected but all over the planet. In some areas, this ice is very near the surface, essentially at the surface. In others it may be a few meters below. The indications come from hydrogen detection by orbiting spacecraft and the detection of widespread hydrated minerals. The belief is that only water (and ice) could cause these spectral signatures. And of course ice was found essentially at the surface at the Phoenix landing site.

So, there's no absence of ice on Mars, nor is there an indication that this ice is not water ice. I would imagine that it is water ice, and depending on where it is found, it is probably in a highly pure state. Meltwater from these ice deposits might well be potable. Whoo-hoo! Mission to Mars, here we come!

Well, that is unless it is filled with nasty microbes... Is that possible? Sure. There's no sign -- yet -- that such is the case, but it's worth noting that no orbiter or lander sent to Mars since the Vikings in 1976 have carried biology-detection instruments, not even biology inferring instruments. It's worth asking why not, but answers probably won't be forthcoming. Not only have there been no direct biology detection instruments, there have been no instruments which could analyse the soil for the hypothesized hyper-oxides which supposedly sterilized the soil at the Viking landing sites of any organic matter and thus of any biology. There weren't even instruments to measure the ultraviolet flux that was supposed to be a contributing factor in the complete sterilization of the Martian surface.

It seemed as if the hypotheses advanced to explain the failure of the Vikings to detect biology for certain in 1976 were being accepted on faith without even an attempt at verification. To me, as an interested observer, it was bizarre.

It occurred to me, though, that quite possibly the hypotheses of a sterile Martian surface were never accepted (13 pg pdf), and that was why there was no apparent effort at verification. Why verify something you know isn't true? On the other hand, it might have helped to falsify those sterility hypotheses, no?

What has been learned is a sideways falsification, I guess. There are organic materials in the soil, for example, materials which, for whatever reason, the Viking instruments did not detect. There are no signs of  hyper-oxides sterilizing the soil. Instead, there are widespread peroxides and perchlorates and salts and significant regions of near-surface ice, all of which indicate the presence of water both historically and currently. The notion that the surface of Mars is dry and dead and sterile is slowly -- painfully slowly -- yielding to a more complete understanding...

The surface of Mars may somewhat resemble a terrestrial desert, but it's not much like the surface of the Earth at all. It mimics... but it isn't the same.

The surface has many signs of flowing and pooling liquid -- both historic and recent/current -- but just what that liquid is or was isn't certain. It is assumed to be water, probably quite briny, but again, it's not certain. It may have been water in some places, whereas something else -- such as sulfuric acid -- may have been the surface volatile in others. There are indications of sulfates and sulfur in various places on Mars, which in combination with hydrogen and oxygen -- both of which are in fair abundance -- can produce various strengths of sulfuric acid. As an aqueous solution, it would behave almost like water -- except that it would remain liquid at very low temperatures and pressures, though eventually it would sublimate away like water.

So. The breathless announcement last week that "flowing water" had been "discovered" -- or rather confirmed -- on Mars has to come with a caveat or two. Those streaks have long been known and have long been speculated to be caused -- somehow -- by water flowing downhill. But how or why the water involved would be pumped to the tops of cliffs and crater rims in order to be released to flow down the cliffs and into craters is still a mystery. It doesn't really make hydrological sense, but it seems to be what happens.

Hydrated minerals/perchlorate salts have been spectrally found in association with the streaks but only when they are dark, not when they are faded or light. I have a problem with that in that hydrated minerals and perchlorates appear to be commonplace on the surface, found nearly everywhere. If the fading or lightening of these streaks is due to evaporation/sublimation, then the presence of salts should be stronger not weaker when the streaks have faded or lightened. But not what's found.

There has apparently been no spectral signature of water found in association with these streaks, and that's interesting all by itself. Water is simply assumed. Not necessarily wise given the way Mars deceives and mimics.

I suspect that we will not actually know about the surface of Mars until and unless people go there to measure and test and explore, and somehow survive the encounter. That adventure has been long-delayed, but what with all these new findings of "flowing water" -- and the blockbuster movie opening tomorrow -- you never know.

In Defense of Percival Lowell

I've spent some time looking at Mars in a telescope and looking at other people's pictures of Mars taken with their telescopes, and I've spent some time looking at Percival Lowell's drawings of Mars from which he derived his famous (or infamous) interpretations about canals and civilizations. I've also been to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ and heard the stories they tell there of his observational acumen.

No one claims there are canals on Mars now, but for some time it has been customary to denounce Lowell's observations as "optical illusions," and to declare that there is "nothing really there" where he said he saw canals. Carl Sagan was among those famous for doing it.

And I never felt it was entirely fair. Lowell was said to have been one of the finest planetary observers of his era, though he lacked academic training in the field. His observatory was located in one of the finest observing locations in the country, and Lowell Observatory is still one of the nation's premiere observatories and research centers.

In an earlier post, I juxtaposed an illustration of Lowell's freehand drawing of what he saw in the Solis Lacus region of Mars in 1896 with three telescopic views taken with a CCD camera in 2006, 110 years later in the UK. The similarities are striking.

There are differences to be sure. Especially the size of the "pupil" of the Solis "eye." Lowell's is small and discreet, the "pupil" in the CCD image is large and extended. But many of the other features correspond almost exactly. Those features we now know include dark-floored craters, "fossae," dark and light terrains, volcanoes, and clouds among other things. I was able to toggle easily between the images, so it was startling to see the correspondences and to spot more of them each time I toggled.

Among the most striking correspondences is the appearance of lines on the CCD images, several of them in remarkably similar positions to those delineated by Lowell.

Side by side comparison; features seen on the CCD image are marked with arrows on the Lowell drawing [Note: South is at the top of the images.]

Side by side comparison of Mars Solis Lacus quadrant
left drawing by Percival Lowell, c. 1896
  CCD telescopic image by D. Peach, 2005
Correspondences noted on Lowell drawing

If you are able to relax your eyes a bit, you will see many -- many! -- linear markings on the CCD image, both light-toned and dark, some of which correspond to Lowell's markings, some of which don't. The correspondence of spots between the drawing and the CCD image taken more than 100 years later is remarkable, especially given the differences inherent in the, telescopes, the techniques and the tendency of the eye and hand to diverge when attempting to record visual impressions. (Think of courtroom drawings.)

The faint linear markings on the CCD image are NOT "optical illusions." They are on all the CCD images from that sequence so they are real in the sense that the CCD camera was able to record them. But there are many other CCD images taken by others around the same time that do not show linear markings as this one does.

What gives?

The "optical illusion" argument tends to fail when CCD images show linear markings similar to those Lowell recorded 100 years before. So other arguments have been put forth proposing that the linear markings are actually a telescopic artifact. Something in the optics of the telescope makes them "appear." This argument was offered in part because other astronomers also reported seeing linear marking corresponding to Lowell's canals, and Lowell for his part reported linear markings on the surface of Venus and Mercury when he trained the telescope on them.

I'm more inclined to accept the optics argument than I am the illusion argument, but even so, it seems to me there's something about the surface of Mars itself that allows and requires the appearance of linear markings in some telescopes but not in others. Given the fact that Lowell's telescope was a huge 24" refractor, and most of the modern amateur CCD images are made through a much smaller reflector or Schmidt/Maksutov Cassegrain telescopes, the "optics" argument becomes difficult to fathom.

[Note (as of 9:30pm Friday, August 10, 2012): a huge limb just broke off a eucalyptus tree down the street, blocking the road, exploding street lamps and power transformers, and causing much to do in the neighborhood. Power went out briefly, but there are wires crossed all over, and the exploded transformer is a big problem. Will probably lose power again as repairs are made. That tree has been there since God was a boy, and it periodically drops fair sized limbs, but this time the branch that snapped was enormous. Good thing nobody (that we know of) was under it at the time. Another big tree on the same property fell a few years ago in a storm, destroying the garage and badly damaging a neighbor's house. A neighbor said he witnessed the whole thing tonight, and he thought it was the end of the world...]

The point I'm making is that Lowell was a very accurate observer who honestly recorded what he saw when he observed Mars. Many of his contemporaries saw similar features. And similar features can still be seen and recorded on the surface of Mars with much different telescopes. I have seen some of them myself. It has never looked to me like the surface is crisscrossed with canals, but it is quite possible to resolve straight lines -- both dark and light colored -- that appear to connect various dark and light spots.

It's not an illusion.

There is something which produces the appearance of these lines, and given the absolute abundance of linear features of all kinds on the surface of Mars -- some of which have never been adequately explained, especially the "searchlight" and other linear features that Mariner 9 revealed, many of which are no longer seen in orbiter images -- it seems worth investigating how the surface features, the Martian atmosphere, the terrestrial atmosphere and telescopic optics all interact to produce the appearance of "canali" as described by Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877.

Cerberus Fossae, set of deep troughs with dark interiors, about 1600 km long

The image above is from Google Mars and shows some of the most prominent linear features on the surface, the Cerberus Fossae, a paired set of dark-floored trenches, some 1600 km from one end to another, that are still something of a mystery. I did a brief survey of "fossae" using Google Mars, and there are literally thousands of examples, dozens of them 1000km long or more.

The conventional wisdom is that relief on the surface of Mars cannot be detected with Earth-based telescopes even today, and that the various and numerous fossae on the surface are so narrow -- at most, a few kilometers wide, in the case of the Cerberus Fossae above, only about half a kilometer -- they cannot be resolved by Earth-based telescopes. While volcanoes and craters have long been seen on the surface of Mars, including the vast Valles Marineris canyons, they weren't recognized for what they were because it was impossible to detect surface relief. In fact, prior to spacecraft explorations, it was assumed that Mars had very little surface relief because none could be detected.

This is an unlabeled US Air Force map of Mars from 1962, which will give you an idea of how widely  the linear features of Mars were accepted prior to the arrival of spacecraft:

USAF map of Mars, c. 1962. Clickage will embiggen.

I got the map from this site where the development of Mars mapping is explored. Lowell's maps of Mars are not nearly as sophisticated but they are not dissimilar.

Lowell's map of Mars, c. 1894 for comparison:

Map of Mars drawn by Percival Lowell, c. 1894

Some observers have seen surface features very much like those recorded by Lowell throughout the history of telescopic observations, and some of them can be detected by modern CCD cameras. The appearance of linear markings on the surface of Mars is quite real. They are well and truly there, and they are there at many different scales.

In another post, I may get into the scale issue, for in some ways it may be a key to understanding what is going on.

[Today and tomorrow are travel days....]

Killer Kulture

Mars, Bitches!








It was the strangest mash up yesterday, with most of my day taken up in following the Oak Creek Temple Massacre on line and then in the evening staying up late to watch the latest Mars landing, also online. Olympics gymnastics was on the teevee, but I really haven't watched the Olympics since the opening ceremony, and then only to be struck dumb by the... erm... spectacle(?).

[As as side note, once I learned of the modern Olympics' pretty overtly fascist operations and highly corrupt underpinning, if you will, I began to see the Games more as a mean joke than as a serious competition;  as a rule, I don't see more than a few minutes of a few events, especially since the Games have been on NBC, whose coverage is another mean joke. But I digress.]

Both the Massacre and the Mars Landing were highly evocative of past events, the Landing going back to the very long ago, the Massacre evocative of much more recent events.

I was struck by how antiquated the NASA/JPL procedures were as the Curiosity Mission neared Mars. My doG, they were still using 3 ring binders to read off their sequences, despite the fact that they had the latest computer equipment right in front of them. They were watching the plots of the landing on large screens at the sides of the room, just as they would have done at Houston Mission Control decades ago, and there were rows and rows of Curiosity Mission Control terminals at which rows and rows of Mission Control personnel scanned monitors for data and announced their satisfaction therewith as the Mission Scientist called on them one by one. Their voices were distorted the way space mission voices have been distorted by space mission radio gear for decades. At one point, the Mission Scientist's radio gear failed, the way that such gear seems to fail fairly often at Mission Control, and a colleague handed over his own equipment so that the Mission Scientist could communicate with the rest of the room.

The Curiosity Mission team was a highly individualistic bunch, though, and I would say the "star" of the room -- who never said a word publicly -- was a Latin looking dude with a fancy multi-colored roach haircut with stars shaven spray painted into the side of his head. He didn't say anything and he didn't really seem to have anything to do but nod his head, grin and look decorative. And why not? It's Mars!

Mohawk Guy is an Internet SuperStar:

 

Damb, we're easily amused!

I found I was just as caught up in the Landing as I'd been when Mercury capsules were returning to Earth; and it was a real thrill when the announcement came that the Curiosity craft was on the surface of Mars. Even more of a thrill was the first image from the surface, a thumbnail that had been enormously enlarged so that it was almost impossible to make out what it showed. It didn't matter; it was a picture from the surface, broadcast of millions of miles, after a landing that had taken place moments before, and it was from Mars.

Wow.

And all of it was so evocative of so much space exploration since I was a child. Seriously, nothing has changed. It is the same operating theory and practice now as it was 50 years ago and more. The same procedures, the same hierarchies, the same look, the same sound.

Striking too is the fact that there hasn't been a mission to Mars that could actually look for the "markers" of biology -- not for life itself, of course -- since 1976, when the Viking Landers returned ambiguous data that were officially interpreted as indicating a sterile lifeless surface, without any carbon or carbon compounds at all (not even from meteorites) and literally lethal to living organisms due to deadly ultraviolet light and a surface saturated with peroxides and other substances and compounds which would kill anything and everything on contact.

I've made Mars something of a hobby for many years, even set up a website (which still exists though many of the links no longer work) beginning in 1997 or so to explore some of the controversies and disputes concerning what was really what on Mars. I was an active participant in a few space science boards, and through them became acquainted with quite a number of planetary scientists and interested laymen. Through sometimes heated discussions on those boards, I learned a great deal about what was not known or poorly understood about Mars, and especially how heavily images and information released to the public had been manipulated for many years to further certain standard and accepted theories rather than provide the means to explore and debate.

I learned that it was more than marginally likely that the Vikings had indeed "discovered life on Mars" but that there were political reasons both within the government and within NASA's planetary science community to obscure the data and deny the "discovery" -- if it was a discovery.

I made a "discovery" myself based on Mars Orbital Camera images taken near the south pole -- evidence and images of active geysers. And wouldn't you know, the evidence I produced was fiercely denied, and my interpretation was denounced as "an optical illusion."

My cropped and colorized image of Martian geysers near the South Pole c. 1999

Later, surprisingly -- or not -- the question of geysers at the south pole of Mars became something of a serious study, and surprisingly enough -- or not -- the presence of active geysers at certain seasons of the Mars year was widely accepted within the planetary science community, mechanisms enabling geysering were explained, and essentially everything but the visual evidence I provided has become standard and essentially uncontroversial. There had been scientific speculation about active geysering on Mars for years, but interestingly, the trigger for the acceptance of the notion was Gregg Orme's "Mars Spiders" investigations, the "spiders" being frequently encountered surface features that were otherwise inexplicable.

I also made stabs at discovering currently active glaciers on the surface, some of which have since been confirmed.

I stepped back from more active exploration of the Mars surface data when it became clear to me after the Pathfinder, Opportunity, and Spirit Missions, that the long-time focus on the question of whether there was or ever had been flowing water on Mars was barking up the wrong tree. Whether or not there had ever been "water" on the surface -- which obviously there was both as ice and flowing water -- the far more common liquid at the surface had been and perhaps still is sulfuric acid.

Liquid water and liquid sulfuric acid are chemically similar (H2O vs H2SO4) and -- depending on what you are looking for and how you look -- they may be indistinguishable, but the one can imply the presence of biology while the other will almost certainly imply the absence of biology (at least on Earth.)

When it occurred to me that quite possibly sulfuric acid had been the primary surface liquid throughout the history of Mars, a whole lot of otherwise difficult to understand evidence seemed to make sense.

Sulfuric acid has a much lower freezing temperature than water, and it doesn't require the atmospheric pressure water does in order to remain liquid over time. Under current conditions, in other words, sulfuric acid could remain liquid and flow over much of the Martian surface (assuming it was available at the surface) whereas pure water could not do so for more than a very brief period before freezing or evaporating. But flowing sulfuric acid would have the effect of sterilizing the surface just as surely as any of the hypothesized oxides, peroxides and superoxides that were once alleged to have combined with hyper-ultraviolet flux to sterilize the surface.

The key to understanding presence of biology or the absence of biology on Mars (which would be even more peculiar if there had been a water regime) lay in acceptance of the idea that "water" as we understand it -- whether solid, liquid or gas -- may never have been abundant at the surface of Mars during any period of the planet's history and continued focus on finding such evidence may be a wild goose chase if sulfuric acid was the key surface volatile throughout Mars's history.

There is evidence of at least some water at some time periods -- including now -- on Mars, and that water could have harbored biology, but if it ever did, it seems to me that any potential biology would have been killed if there was contact between water at or below the surface and the abundant sulfuric acid. Mars, therefore, is potentially self-sterilizing, a Killer Planet, but not necessarily the way planetary scientists have long hypothesized.

Needless to say, the appropriate tests to find out are not being done, any more than tests to confirm the presence or absence of the long-hypothesized sterilizing super-oxides have ever been done. (Actually, there's no experimental evidence on Mars that they exist at all.)

Meanwhile, in Oak Creek, a suburb of Milwaukee, an All-American Killer went on a rampage at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, apparently taking out the prominent men of the religious community before apparently being killed himself by police. I say "apparently" because these All-American massacres and slaughters have a way of turning out to be not quite what they are initially reported to be, and especially the killers themselves aren't quite what they were initially made out to be.

I haven't checked news on either Mars or the Massacre this morning so I'm not sure how either story has developed; I'm recording mostly what I saw/heard yesterday.

There were initial reports of up to four shooters in Wisconsin which police assure us was probably really only the one, seen from different angles. According to later reports, the shooter was some sort of skinhead white supremacist who may have been seeking revenge for 9/11, but at the time, there was no way to even begin to confirm such a thing. However, the authorities quickly classified the attack as an act of "domestic terrorism" -- something they have been highly reluctant to do in the case of white men shooting up people and places or making terrorist threats to blow up this or that monument or facility.

Until recently, at any rate, "terrorism" in the popular mind and among our National Security authorities was almost entirely confined to Muslims and brown people. Only since the advent of the Occupy activities which have involved all kinds of anarchists have white men been rounded up and accused of "terrorism."

This may be the first time that a "skinhead" or "white supremacist" has been designated a "terrorist." But since he was apparently killed in a gun battle with police, he will not be subject to ... interrogation. We may never know the truth about him.

Unfortunately, the threats to and murder of Sikhs in revenge for 9/11 (which they had nothing to do with) has been fairly common in this country for years. In fact, I think one of the first revenge killings after 9/11 was of a Sikh walking on the street. There have been quite a few more since then, but nothing on the scale of the massacre yesterday.

But the myth-makers were busy yesterday assuring us that there had never been any threats to the Sikh community in Wisconsin, which is just silly. Yes, there have been threats. It's a fact of life for Sikhs in the United States, whether in Wisconsin or anywhere else. The myth of no threats against Sikhs is bogus.

Some Sikhs in America do not wear turbans or beards because of the ignorance of too many Americans regarding the origin and nature of Sikhism, and the fact that Sikhs had nothing to do with 9/11 or any other terrorist attack on Americans. (In India it's a different story, but we'll leave that aside for now.)

This is the second All-American Massacre in America's Heartland in a little over less than a month. Let's hope we're not on yet another cycle of copy-cat massacres, but we may be. American Exceptionalism, eh?

It's simply been a fact that people with the itch to kill in our culture find their impetus more easily available when someone else does it "first."

For a time, I wondered if the All-American Massacre was a result of Manchurianizing or otherwise "triggering" particularly vulnerable individuals to kill, whether or not they were actively recruited or trained. I don't think we can ever know. But G2Geek's exploration of "Stochastic" terrorism is worth some additional contemplation. His hypothesis is basically that the American culture itself provides the triggers for these periodic mass killings, that there is something very deep seated in our collective sub-consciousness that almost requires it.

And when you think about all the mass murders and massacres that have been features, not bugs, of  Euro-American culture from the beginning, starting almost at the moment Europeans first set foot in this New World and continuing relentlessly ever since,  then there may truly be no way out of this Killer Kulture box we're in.

Gun nuts of course reject any controls on their acquisition and use of personal weaponry, which is just absurd. But they may be right that controlling firearms access might not have any effect on the tendency of some Americans to engage in massacre. It may not be due the guns or their availability that enables the routine massacre of Americans by other Americans. It may be the culture itself, going back to the very beginnings of what we now call "America."

Something so deep seated and so out of whack will take more than a superficial approach to change.

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Now to check the news.