[FPSPACE] Is Mars Between Ice Ages?

[LARRY KLAES]

Is Mars Between Ice Ages?

“Mars is not a dead planet - it undergoes climate changes that are even more 
pronounced than on Earth.”

James Head of Brown University

The prevailing thinking is that Mars is a planet whose active climate has 
been confined to the distant past. About 3.5 billion years ago, the Red 
Planet had extensive flowing water and then fell quiet - deadly quiet. It 
didn’t seem the climate had changed much since. Now, recent studies by 
scientists at Brown University show that Mars’ climate has been much more 
dynamic than previously believed.

After examining stunning high-resolution images taken last year by the Mars 
Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers have documented for the first time that 
ice packs at least 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) thick and perhaps 2.5 kilometers 
(1.6 miles) thick existed along Mars’ mid-latitude belt as recently as 100 
million years ago. In addition, the team believes other images tell them 
that glaciers flowed in localized areas in the last 10 to 100 million years 
- a blink of the eye in Mars’s geological timeline.

This evidence of recent activity means the Martian climate may change again 
and could bolster speculation about whether the Red Planet can, or did, 
support life.

“We’ve gone from seeing Mars as a dead planet for three-plus billion years 
to one that has been alive in recent times,” said Jay Dickson, a research 
analyst in the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown and lead author. 
“[The finding] has changed our perspective from a planet that has been dry 
and dead to one that is icy and active.”

In fact, Dickson and his co-authors, James Head, a planetary geologist, and 
David Marchant, an associate professor at Boston University, believe the 
images show that Mars has gone through multiple Ice Ages - episodes in its 
recent past in which the planet’s mid-latitudes were covered by glaciers 
that disappeared with changes in the Red Planet’s obliquity, which changes 
the climate by altering the amount of sunlight falling on different areas.

Full article here:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/05/the-ice-ages-of.html