Thursday, June 14, 2007

Lovecraft & Mars: Mars Had Water !

Lovecraft was keenly interested in astronomy and Mars. He frequently wrote of Mars inhis columns in the local newspaper and met Percival Lowell who believed that mars had water. Lovecraft did not.

Now, it seems that 100 years later, we have evidence that there was an ocean on Mars! If so, the eldritch gods walked upon the surface, and perhaps 2 billion yeras ago Cthulhu had a brother under the Martian Ocean !!




MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. - NASA astrobiologists at the University of California, Berkeley have discovered evidence supporting the presence of large oceans of liquid water on early Mars.
One of the most obvious surface features on Mars is a large plain surrounding the north pole that resembles a sediment-filled ocean basin with shoreline-like features.

The scientists' research is scheduled to be published in the June 14 issue of Nature magazine.

"This work strongly supports the idea that there were large standing bodies of water on the Martian surface," said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., which co-funded the study. "Interpreting this topography as an ancient northern ocean could have a great impact on current and future Mars exploration," he added.

Scientists calculate that on Mars, an initial shift of 50 degrees from today's pole would be sufficient to disrupt the shoreline.

If a flood of water had filled an ocean at the northern pole on Mars about 3 billion years ago, its mass might have been enough to shift the pole 50 degrees to the south. Once the water disappeared, the pole could have shifted back.


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