Comments on: Water on a sub-freezing Mars

By: Albert

Albert — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:20:04 +0000

Ignorance is always so arrogant… No they didn’t discover that dissolved salts lower water’s freezing point. What they did is to apply that common fact (so common that everybody knows, just look at what they do on the highways in winter) to Mars, analyzing the actual composition of the soils, revealed by 40 years of spacecraft work. With those data, they modeled the possible behavior of the aqueous solutions, and gave concrete percentages of liquid water vs ice at reasonable temperatures for ancient Mars. The results deserved publication in the num 1 scientific journal of the world. But i’m sure Nathan Myers can do the same at home with his XBox and having a beer… That’s why his name is so acknowledged everywhere…

By: llewelly

llewelly — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:39:49 +0000

Every night on Mars, it gets much colder than the temperature at which ordinary ocean water freezes at. There are large regions on Mars which seldom or never reach the temperatures at which ordinary ocean water freezes at.

Unfortunately, neither the abstract nor the press release gives a freezing temperature (for the theorized salty water of Mars) more helpful 'less than 273 K' . A little bit less, like sea water, or a lot less? The first is not much of a discovery, and probably doesn't explain much. The second would be interesting.

By: Nathan Myers

Nathan Myers — Fri, 29 May 2009 02:09:29 +0000

Did they really only just discover that dissolved salts lower water's freezing point? What will they think of next? (Mile-wide collapsed lava tubes, maybe?)