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Rover Images Confirm Jezero Crater is an Ancient Martian Lake

posted by mrpg on Monday October 11 2021, @03:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the fossils! dept.

upstart writes:

Rover images confirm Jezero crater is an ancient Martian lake: The findings include signs of flash flooding that carried huge boulders downstream into the lakebed.:

The first scientific analysis of images taken by NASA's Perseverance rover has now confirmed that Mars' Jezero crater -- which today is a dry, wind-eroded depression -- was once a quiet lake, fed steadily by a small river some 3.7 billion years ago.

The images also reveal evidence that the crater endured flash floods. This flooding was energetic enough to sweep up large boulders from tens of miles upstream and deposit them into the lakebed, where the massive rocks lie today.

[...] "We now have the opportunity to look for fossils," says team member Tanja Bosak, associate professor of geobiology at MIT. "It will take some time to get to the rocks that we really hope to sample for signs of life. So, it's a marathon, with a lot of potential."

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 13 2021, @05:57AM

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Wednesday October 13 2021, @05:57AM (#1186595) Homepage
    Nope. Your argument extrapolates to claiming that we're as close to our biological ancesters several hundred million years back as any other creature is to its biological ancestors the same distance back. And yet there are creatures that are virtually unchanged over that interval.

    You're assuming that speciation is accompanied by everlasting symmetry.

    There's no reason for that, and, more importantly, there's no known mechanism for that. On top of that, there are good reasons why it should be false - read some Gould, the pressures that affect one species significantly need not effect its nearest cousins at all - if that was their evolutionary deviation. The equilibria have no reason to line up, or last as long, at all, and the punctuations thereof have no reason to be equal in effect.

    It's an assumption that should not be made, and given that if you test it, it fails horribly, it should be rejected.
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