This is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, 8th Edition (2008), by Dr. Walt Brown. It is designed to be read online.
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Water recently and briefly flowed at various locations on Mars.80 Photographic comparisons show that some water flowed within the last 2–5 years!81 Mars has water ice at its poles.82 At various latitudes, impact craters sometimes expose thin ice layers a foot or so beneath the surface.83 Mars’ stream beds usually originate on crater walls rather than in ever smaller tributaries as on Earth.84 Rain formed other channels.85 Martian drainage channels and layered strata are found at almost isolated 200 locations.86 Most gullies are on crater slopes at high latitudes87—extremely cold slopes that receive little sunlight. One set of erosion gullies is on the central peak of an impact crater!88
Figure 163: Erosion Channels on Mars. These channels frequently originate in scooped-out regions, called amphitheaters, high on a crater wall. On Earth, where water falls as rain, erosion channels begin with narrow tributaries that merge with larger tributaries and finally, rivers. Could impacts of comets or icy asteroids have formed these craters, gouged out amphitheaters, and melted the ice—each within seconds? Mars, which is much colder than Antarctica in the winter, would need a heating source, such as impacts, to produce liquid water.
Today, Mars is cold, averaging -80°F (112 Fahrenheit degrees below freezing). Water on Mars should be ice, not liquid water. Mars’ low atmospheric pressures would hasten freezing even more.89
Did liquid water come from below Mars’ surface or above? Most believe that subsurface water on Mars migrated upward for hundreds of miles to the surface. However, this would not carve erosion gullies on a crater’s central peak. Besides, the water would freeze a mile or two below the surface.90 Even volcanic eruptions on Mars would not melt enough water fast enough to release the estimated 10–1,000 million cubic meters of water per second needed to cut each stream bed.91 (This exceeds the combined flow rate of all rivers on Earth that enter an ocean.)
Water probably came from above. Soon after Earth’s global flood, the radiometer effect caused asteroids to spiral out to the asteroid belt, just beyond Mars. This gave asteroids frequent opportunities to collide with Mars. When crater-forming impacts occurred, large amounts of debris were thrown into Mars’ atmosphere. Mars’ thin atmosphere and low gravity allowed the debris to settle back to the surface in vast layers of thin sheets—strata.

PREDICTION 38: Most sediments taken from layered strata on Mars and returned to Earth will show that they were deposited through Mars’ atmosphere, not through water. (Under a microscope, water deposited grains have nicks and gouges, showing that they received many blows as they tumbled along stream bottoms. Sediments deposited through an atmosphere receive few nicks.)
Impact energy (and heat) from icy asteroids and comets bombarding Mars released liquid water, which often pooled inside craters or flowed downhill and eroded the planet’s surface.92 (Most liquid water soaked into the soil and froze.) Each impact was like the bursting of a large dam here on Earth. Brief periods of intense, hot rain and localized flash floods followed.93 These Martian hydrodynamic cycles quickly “ran out of steam,” because Mars receives relatively little heat from the Sun. While the consequences were large for Mars, the total water was small by Earth’s standards—about twice the water in Lake Michigan.
Today, when meteorites strike icy soil on Mars, some of that ice melts. When this happens on a crater wall, liquid water flows down the crater wall, leaving the telltale gullies that have shocked the scientific community.81

PREDICTION 39: As has been discovered on the Moon and apparently on Mercury, frost, rich in heavy hydrogen, will be found within asteroids and in permanently shadowed craters on Mars. [See pages 276 and 284.]