Reposted from Community to Space/Science by request — though I really should have known better…

Dan’s Smoker

According to the article:

“Some time ago Dan Spires was looking through images recently returned from the Mars Orbital Camera, at the time trying to spot surface streaks that he and a number of other observers thought might be due to fluid flow at the surface of Mars, at the time quite a radical idea.”

Not quite.

Actually, Felix and I departed the Zone for some semi-serious research, away from all the flighty comments that would cloud our attempts to find reason. Many of the petroleum posters simply wanted to write something, anything, just so long as it gets posted, presumably to ride each other’s coattails to success.

No such luck.

At the time, the prevailing idea was that the dark streaks on Mars might have been trickling streams of water, but this idea evolved into trickling petroleum, as oil would stand a better chance of surviving the extreme Martian environment. An argument was raised that petroleum required life for its basic formation. Having read up on Dyson’s petroleum findings in Russia, I said that it wasn’t, that the streaks were merely signs of erosion, all of which sparked a lot of controversy, as well as a lot of research from both sides. The base results were that:

a) The majority of biological oil fields — those containing biological material — can be found pooling in the region of ancient impact craters, as with Chicxulub and the Gulf of Mexico, with the Yucatan Peninsula marking the center splash of the impactor, as with the fields off the shores of Vietnam and southern China (and by this simplistic logic, the Arizona field should be huge – provided 65,000,000 years is old enough, and there’s enough bio-petroleum in the area to pool into the fractured basin of the famous crater, still far beneath the planet’s surface).

b) Russia does a lot of deep drilling, miles deep, well below fossil level, well below America’s drilling standards — amazing how deep one will go when told there are to be no second tries — for pockets of geologic petroleum, so why would there be no petroleum on Mars?

My argument was that the erosion was caused by the release of moisture, through melting and sublimation of a thin crust of ice just below the visible surface of Mars. This might dislodge a bit of rigolith, sending it cascading down a slope, and the differing shades of the streaks merely displaying increments of age. The geologic petroleum fields of Mars are, as with the Earth, likely miles-deep underground.

Now, later thinking on the displayed Martian map, that particularly dark streak to the southwest, the same I was checking when I found the smoker, appears to originate in the proper region to mark the vent in perhaps another larger, far older smoker. Pressing the point, I know, but then there is the evidence of the much smaller smokers to the northwest of the one marked as Dan’s Smoker.

Hard to tell with the resolution NASA supplied, but I think it’s enough to raise a few thoughts on the matter.

Still wondering about it all…