Wet Mars theory dries up, according to articles in ABC News in Science and BBC News 10 September 2012 and Nature Geoscience online 9 September 2012.
Satellites equipped with infrared sensors orbiting Mars have detected clay minerals known as phyllosilocates on the Martian surface. Clay is formed by the weathering of rocks by liquid water, and finding clay on Mars has been used as evidence that Mars was once warm and wet enough for life. Alain Meunier of the University of Poitiers, France, and colleagues have studied volcanic rocks taken from the Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia and found they contained the same clay minerals as seen on Mars. However, these clay minerals were precipitated directly from water-rich molten rock as it cooled, rather than from later weathering.
The research team examined the Mururoan lavas under infra-red light. Meunier stated: “The infrared spectra we got in the lab (on Mururoa clays) using a reflected beam are astonishingly similar to that obtained on Mars by the orbiters”. According to Brian Hynek of University of Colorado: “Such a result would imply that early Mars may not have been as habitable as previously thought at the time when Earth’s life was taking hold”. Meunier told BBC News: “Mars was not as warm and wet in its earliest time as some have suggested. I do not believe in an early ocean on Mars”.
Editorial Comment The obsession with finding liquid water on Mars is based on the belief that where there is liquid water (and a few other chemicals) life will evolve by ‘chemistry alone’, and that will confirm their belief that life evolved from chemical processes on earth without any need for a Creator God. However, whilst water is necessary to sustain life, it cannot create life, even when other chemicals needed to build living cells already exist in the water. Life requires genetic information which it is easy to prove does not come from the chemistry in any living creature. The chemicals in the genes on living cells may carry the information, but the information is not in the chemicals – it is in the arrangement of the chemicals. Chemicals provably cannot create such information. That’s easy to prove – try it and see. You will discover that all known information is only ever the product of a creative designer outside of the chemicals, who uses them for a purpose.
Therefore, our punch line is simple: life will only exist wherever the Creator places it. He could have put some on Mars if He wanted to, but we suspect He didn’t because He has told us that the function of Mars and the other planets and stars, is that they were made to serve mankind for “signs, seasons, days and years”. (Genesis 1:14). The word “planet” means moving star.
Areology is the study of the geology of Mars, but since “geo” refers to the earth, someone who knows Greek came up with the word Areology, derived from the Greek Ares, which is the Greek name of the Roman god Mars. The term was originally used in science fiction.
Evidence News 26 September 2012