Curiosity drills into the watery origins of Mars The Martian rock samples dug up by NASA's Curiosity robotic rover show that there is a wide diversity of minerals, allowing scientists to piece together the planet's past. The results have been published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Elizabeth Rampe, first author of the study and NASA researcher at the …
https://www.anyplaceamerica.com/directory/ca/inyo-county-06027/summits/salsberry-peak-1661368/
Named after a developer (con artist?) named Jack Salsberry, who sold/promoted mining claims in the area around the Black Mountains, in the South East corner of what we now call Death Valley National Park in the early 1900s.
I think the original geochemistry has been mangled either in the press release or in the Reg's article.
Magnetite and haematite are good indicators for the oxidation/reduction state of the conditions when a rock formed, or was altered by hydrothermal processes. Oxidation causes a process known as martitisation which sees the replacement of magnetite by haematite, whilst mushketovitisation has haematite being converted to magnetite due to reduction by hydrogen.
So you can work out the redox conditions in water from the sediments laid down at the time which gives you a clue of the different environments that would have been present. Examining iron oxides from the Gale sediments suggest the margins of the crater were generally oxidising whilst the central region was more typically highly-reduced.
Mars' escape velocity is 5km/s so anything incoming is going to have at least that much speed behind it. I don't see melting an iceberg as a major problem.
The idea is to do it with lots and lots of icebergs. Any water disassociating in to H2 and O2 will probably lose the hydrogen but keep the oxygen around for a while. Which is rather useful for ape-descended life forms who still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
I think he might have meant the core of the planet. Mars is solid all the way through and (probably as a result) has no magnetic field, which is (probably) how its atmosphere got stripped away. Without something to protect it a new atmosphere is just going to be stripped away by the solar wind.
Mars has six craters 400 km in diameter. Hellas Planitia is 2300 km in diameter and 9 km deep indicating an impact by a dense object approximately 300,000 km in diameter, or 20% of the Sun's diameter.
Planet X, or Nibiru, the claimed long orbit brown dwarf of our solar system may be real and the cause of Mars, and previous Earth extinction events.
Let's do some elementary sanity-checking. If there is an object...
1. 20% Sol diameter
2. Within or previously transiting the solar system...
2a. on a Mars-intercepting trajectory of the right energy to neither merge with Mars nor destroy Mars
...then it would be incredibly noticible. Point 2a is important because it significantly constrains the allowable orbits relative to Mars for such an object- in other words, that excludes an aphelion far enough to render it unspottable by current technology, as well as the possibility of a hyperbolic trajectory. Further, something of that size within those constraints would exhibit significant gravitational interaction with, well, everything including artificial satellites and that also would be noticed.
3. The government is conspiring to hide knowledge of this body to prevent worldwide panic, but a few people are being telepathically warned by the Zetan aliens to save humanity from the impending apocalypse and the aliens are doing this extremely inefficiently for some reason.
I'm pretty sure an object 20% the Sun's diameter that hit Mars would have turned it into an asteroid belt, or pancaked it across its surface and carried on. It also would have disturbed the orbits of other inner planets. For comparison, Earth got hit by an object "only" the size of Mars while still mostly molten, and that significantly changed its angular momentum and ejected enough material to create the moon.
Well if we wanted to be really kind to his theory we could alter it slightly to give it a 'slightly' more plausible scenario..
How about it the orbit of this giant planet passes, in astronomical terms, near to mars once every X,000 years or however long it's supposed orbit is.
We could say that orbital detrius from this giant planet peppered mars and earth and could be possible for an extinction event or two.
However, that would be exceptionally kind...
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