In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood

Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.

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[ The Fountains of the Great Deep > The Origin of Asteroids and Meteoroids > Water on Mars ]

Water on Mars

Discoveries of water on Mars are now so common that the subject has become the butt of jokes among planetary scientists: “Congratulations—you’ve discovered water on Mars for the 1,000th time!⁹⁵

Mars is cold, averaging at least -80°F (112°F below freezing). One might think that any liquid water on Mars would quickly freeze, especially at Mars’ low atmospheric pressures.¹⁰² However, comparisons of detailed photographs show that water has flowed on Mars within the last few years^u—and today, during Martian summers, saltwater appears to flow out of equatorial facing slopes!¹⁰³ How could that be?¹⁰⁴

asteroids-mars_erosion_channels1.jpg Image Thumbnail

Figure 180: 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, whose average equatorial temperature is colder than the average temperature in Antarctica, would need a heating source, such as impacts, to produce liquid water.

Did the liquid water originally come from below Mars’ surface or above? Most believe that subsurface water on Mars migrated upward for hundreds of miles to the surface. However, that would not carve erosion gullies on parts of crater walls, as shown in Figure 180, or on a Martian crater’s central peak. Besides, the water would freeze a mile or two below the surface.¹⁰⁵ Even volcanic eruptions on Mars would not melt water fast enough to release the estimated 10–1,000 million cubic meters of water per second needed to cut each stream bed.¹⁰⁶ (This exceeds the combined flow rate of all of Earth’s rivers that enter an ocean.)

The salty water came from above. Soon after Earth’s global flood, the radiometer effect spiraled asteroids out to the asteroid belt, just beyond Mars. This gave asteroids frequent opportunities to collide with Mars. Comets also impacted Mars. When an icy impact occurred, the impactor’s kinetic energy became heat energy, melted some ice, gouged out a crater, and kicked up into Mars’ thin atmosphere large amounts of debris mixed with water (liquid, ice crystals, and vapor). Then, the dirt and salt-water mixture settled back to the surface in vast layers of thin sheets—strata—especially around the crater.

Mars has water-ice at its poles.¹⁰⁷ At various latitudes, impact craters sometimes expose thin ice layers a foot or so beneath the surface.¹⁰⁸ Mars’ stream beds usually originate on parts of crater walls instead of in ever smaller tributaries as on Earth.¹⁰⁹ Martian drainage channels and layered strata are found at almost 200 isolated locations.¹¹⁰ Most gullies are on crater slopes at high latitudes¹¹¹—extremely cold slopes that receive little sunlight. One set of erosion gullies is on the central peak of an impact crater.¹¹²

PREDICTION 43: 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.)

Icy asteroids and comets bombarding Mars released liquid water, which often pooled inside craters or flowed downhill and eroded the planet’s surface.¹¹³ (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.¹¹⁴ 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. Liquid water then flows down the crater wall, leaving the telltale gullies that have shocked the scientific community.^u

During Martian summers, rising equatorial and mid-latitude temperatures, although below 32°F (0°C), can melt frozen saltwater. Even today, water appears to be draining down 25°–40° slopes in streams that are up to 1,800 feet long and 1–15 feet wide! (Those dark drainage streaks slowly disappear in the fall and winter, only to begin growing the next spring.) Therefore, that liquid must contain dissolved salts that lower the water’s freezing point. Other clues have narrowed the type of dissolved salts to chlorides (sodium, magnesium, or calcium).

PREDICTION 44: 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 293 and 302.]

Are Some Meteorites from Mars?

Widely publicized claims have been made that at least 100 meteorites from Mars have been found. With international media coverage in 1996, a few scientists also proposed that one of these meteorites, named ALH84001, contained fossils of primitive life. Later studies rejected that claim.

The wormy-looking shapes discovered in a meteorite [supposedly] from Mars turned out to be purely mineralogical and never were alive.¹¹⁵

The 100 meteorites are presumed to have come from the same place, because they contain similar ratios of three types of oxygen: oxygen weighing 16, 17, and 18 atomic mass units. (That presumption is not necessarily true, is it?) A chemical argument then indirectly links one of those meteorites to Mars, but the link is more tenuous than most realize.¹¹⁶ That single meteorite had tiny glass nodules containing dissolved gases. A few of these gases (basically the noble gases: argon, krypton, neon, and xenon) had the same relative abundances as those found in Mars’ atmosphere in 1976. (Actually, a later discovery shows that the mineralogy of these meteorites differs from that of almost all Martian rock.¹¹⁷) Besides, if two things are similar, it does not mean that one came from the other. Similarity in the relative abundances of the noble gases in Mars’ atmosphere and in one meteorite may be because those gases originated in Earth’s preflood subterranean chamber. Rocks and water from the subterranean chamber may have transported those gases to Mars.

Could those 100 meteorites have come from Mars? To escape the gravity of Mars requires a launch velocity of 3 miles per second. Additional velocity is then needed to transfer to an orbit intersecting Earth, 34–236 million miles away. Supposedly, one or more asteroids slammed into Mars and blasted off millions of meteoroids. Millions are needed, because less than one in a million¹¹⁹ would ever hit Earth, be large enough to survive reentry, be found, be turned over to scientists, and be analyzed in detail. Besides, if meteorites can come to Earth from Mars, many more should have come from the Moon—but haven’t.¹²⁰ Furthermore, all the so-called Martian meteorites are magnetic,¹²¹ whereas Mars has no magnetic field.¹²¹

For an impact to accelerate, in a fraction of a second, any solid from rest to a velocity of 3 miles per second requires such extreme shock pressures that much of the material would melt, if not vaporize.¹²² All 100 meteorites should at least show shock effects. Some do not. Also, Mars should have at least six giant craters if such powerful blasts occurred, because six different launch dates are needed to explain the six age groupings the meteorites fall into (based on evolutionary dating methods). Such craters are hard to find, and large, recent impacts on Mars should have been rare.

Then there are energy questions. Almost all impact energy is lost as shock waves and ultimately as heat. Little energy remains to lift rocks off Mars. Even with enough energy, the fragments must be large enough to pass through Mars’ atmosphere. To see the difficulty, imagine throwing a ball high into the air. Then, visualize how hard it would be to throw a handful of dust that high. Atmospheric drag, even in Mars’ thin atmosphere, absorbs too much of the smaller particles’ kinetic energy. Finally, for large particles to escape Mars, the expelling forces must be focused, as occurs in a gun barrel or rocket nozzle. For best results, this should be aimed straight up, to minimize the path length through the atmosphere.

A desire to believe in life on Mars produced a type of “Martian mythology” that continues today. In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported seeing grooves on Mars. The Italian word for groove is “canali”; therefore, many of us grew up hearing about “canals” on Mars—a mistranslation. Because canals are man-made structures, people started thinking about “little green men” on Mars.

In 1894, Percival Lowell, a wealthy, amateur astronomer with a vivid imagination, built Lowell Observatory primarily to study Mars. Lowell published a map showing and naming Martian canals, and wrote several books: Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908). Even into the 1960s, textbooks displayed his map, described vegetative cycles on Mars, and explained how Martians may use canals to convey water from the polar ice caps to their parched cities. Few scientists publicly disagreed with the myth, even after 1949 when excellent pictures from the 200-inch telescope on Mount Palomar were available. Those of us in school before 1960 were directly influenced by such myths; almost everyone has been indirectly influenced.

Artists, science fiction writers, and Hollywood helped fuel this “Martian mania.” In 1898, H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds telling of strange-looking Martians invading Earth. In 1938, Orson Welles, in a famous radio broadcast, panicked many Americans into thinking New Jersey was being invaded by Martians. In 1975, two Viking spacecraft were sent to Mars to look for life. Carl Sagan announced, shortly before the tests were completed, that he was certain life would be discovered—a reasonable conclusion, if life evolved. The prediction failed. In 1996, United States President Clinton read to a global television audience, “More than 4 billion years ago this piece of rock [ALH84001] was formed as a part of the original crust of Mars. After billions of years, it broke from the surface and began a 16-million-year journey through space that would end here on Earth.” “... broke from the surface ...”? The myth is still alive.