Salt water flows on Mars, suggest scientists in reports from ScienceNOW and NASA Science News 4 August 2011.
Scientists analysing images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite orbiting Mars, have found over a thousand dark streaks that seem to grow and shrink with the passing seasons. The streaks are on the facing slopes on the equator and lengthen during the Spring and Summer, but shrink during the late Autumn and Winter. During the warmer seasons the temperatures on the slopes are too warm for carbon dioxide frost to form, but too cold for pure water to be a liquid. However, as dissolved salt lowers the freezing point of water, liquid brine (highly salty water) could exist at these temperatures, and might be flowing down the slopes during the warmer seasons. Other Mars probes have reported evidence of frozen water below the surface of Mars.
Planetary scientist, Joseph Levy of Portland State University, Oregon commented: “Mars looks more like the Dry Valleys of Antarctica every day”. These valleys are moistened by trickles of meltwater in the summer, and bacteria and algae have been found living there. Another planetary scientist Oded Aharonson of the California Institute of Technology, commented: “This may be our best evidence yet of liquid water emerging on the surface of Mars”.
No evidence of water has actually been in the newly discovered streaks and Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, who led the study, made the wry comment: “I’m going to hear from my colleagues: ‘So, you’ve discovered water on Mars for the thousandth time?’” Where there is liquid water many planetary scientists believe there could be life.
Editorial Comment: The current obsession with finding water on any other planets is driven by the belief that where there is water, life could have evolved. The fact that living cells require water to survive does not mean that water makes life occur, and simply having all the correct chemicals needed to make a living cell will not produce a cell unless the chemicals are put together in the correct way and encoded to stay that way, as well as programmed to make copies or offspring.
Like any other code mankind has discovered or invented, the self-replicating life code or DNA turns out to actually be information imposed on matter. It is not generated by the matter that is used in the coded chemicals, no matter how wet they are or have been. Such brilliant design is a key pointer to the intelligent Creator God who not only put together the right chemicals to make a cell, but wrote the code for making the cell and regulating its functions, and embedded it on the DNA molecules with an instruction for it to be copied and passed on to succeeding generations of cells.
Evidence News 8 August 2011
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