Anton masterfully bridges celestial mechanics and astrobiology, revealing Mars as a silent architect of Earth’s climate cycles and a potential cradle for ancient life. It is a sophisticated synthesis that grounds cosmic wonder in rigorous data rather than sensationalist speculation.
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Exciting Discoveries About Mars From the Last Few Months (2026 Edition)Added:
Hello wonderful person. This is Anton and today we're going to discuss the idea referred to as Milanovich cycles. A phenomenon that scientists believe is responsible for cyclical climatic changes on planet Earth and that for the past few million years influenced the formation of things like for example glaciers and the periods we sometimes refer to as the ice age periods as well as resulted in additional changes such as increased or decreased precipitation and the expansion of deserts like the Sahara and this is of course something we've known for a long time for millions of years or climate has shifted between the long frigid ice ages and much milder, shorter, and warmer periods referred to as interglacials. And today, we actually think all of this is governed entirely by other planetary bodies or essentially by subtle nudges here and there and periodic shifts in our planetary movement when it comes to its orbit around the sun. And so, it's these orbital variations that we refer to as Milanovich cycles, named after Milutin Milanovich, who provided a definitive proof for this back in the 1920s. And today we know that these cycles definitely play a huge role in the climate on the planet and especially in something referred to as climatic forcing. They change the distribution of solar radiation on the planet which can then dramatically affect certain areas in just a few hundred years. But for decades many studies in regards to this were focused on obviously the sun and larger planets like Jupiter and Saturn as in most of this is very likely caused by Jupiter but obviously not everything.
And it was really some of the recent and more detailed studies that started to uncover that there's also something else going on here. And specifically, as you can probably tell from the title of this video, much smaller planets like Venus and even Mars seem to play a pretty big role as well. And so in this video, we're going to explore some of these new discoveries and what we actually know about this and specifically focus on this recent study on the effects from these gravitational nudges from our neighbor Mars. But just in case you have no idea what these cycles are and how all of this works, let's do a very brief overview. So how exactly does this work?
Well, this NASA link in the description explain this in a lot of detail, but in essence, there are really only three components. First, we have the eccentricity of the planet. This is the shape of Earth's orbit around the sun.
Is it more circular or is it more elliptical? And so when the orbit is more elliptical or elongated, the variation in distance between Earth and the Sun increases a little bit more. And this affects how much solar radiation Earth gets throughout the year. Today, scientists are pretty certain that this is definitely caused by Jupiter and Saturn. And it seems to manifest itself in a very stable cycle that's about 405,000 years long. And here it actually has three separate periods. And so this much longer stable cycle contains much shorter cycles of around 95,000 and 124,000 years which loosely combine to create the 100,000year cycle. that we actually observe in a lot of geological data. Then we have something referred to as oblique. This is essentially the earth's rotational axis. Now currently the axis sits at about 23.4° but as you can see here it varies between 22.1 and 24.5 and this takes approximately 41,000 years. And so here a graded tilt results in more extreme seasonal temperature variations and thus more extreme weather. Whereas the decree still promotes milder seasons but also encourages a cooling trend which actually can create a glacial period during this time and that's mostly because there's less sunlight in the summer and so at very high latitudes it becomes very difficult to melt previous ice and to warm up the ground and then we have the wobble or the axial procession. This essentially makes Earth kind of similar to a spinning top. And this cycle is about 25,700 years long and generally affects which of the hemispheres ends up getting more sun, especially when Earth is super close to the sun. And so this drives seasonal extremes and combined with other cycles can also create an additional primary cycle of 21,000 years. And so altogether these cycles define Earth's solar forcing shaping glacial and interglacial periods that have dominated Earth's history for the past 2 to 3 million years. But apart from changing the amount of sunlight, these cycles also do something else. For example, one major historical puzzle here is sometimes referred to as the 100,000year problem. And specifically here, although the 100,000year cycle seems to dominate variations in ice volumes on the planet, at least over the past 800,000 years, generally orbital eccentricity contributes much less to changes in solar radiation compared to other cycles. And so there's actually a bit of a discrepancy in how much sunlight Earth is getting and by how much ice seems to decrease and increase every 100,000 years. And so here this discrepancy suggests that Earth's climate system contains a lot of internal feedback mechanisms most likely associated with levels of CO2 and potentially other greenhouse gases that essentially get released or get trapped inside during certain events caused by these cycles. For example, even just a little bit more sunlight may actually start throwing a lot of perafrost which condensed releasing a lot of methane and dramatically decrease the levels of ice in a relatively short time. Furthermore, additional studies from the last few years highlight that a lot of these climatic changes don't just affect the levels of ice or affect the rain, for example. They seem to be also linked to Earth's internal processes such as vulcanism. This was actually reported in one of the recent studies you can find in description. But turns out that variations in global climate and specifically advances and retreats of massive ice sheets, which also result in very different sea level changes, seem to physically modulate volcanic activity on relatively long time scales of thousands to tens of thousands of years.
Or just to rephrase this, vcanism seems to be also directly affected by a lot of these cycles and specifically by the movement of glaciers. So for example, the retreat of glaciers or glacial unloading reduces the pressure on earth's crust which can lead to decompression melting in the underlying mantle. And this actually dramatically increases the rate of volcanoes and thus increases the amount of stuff being released by volcanoes long term. And so by having less glaciers, we actually get more volcanism, which then starts to cool down the climate long term because of all of the gases released from volcanic eruptions. And this is not just a hypothesis. There's actual evidence.
Milanovich cycles of 23, 41, and 100,000 years seem to appear directly correlated to global volcanic activity, suggesting a direct connection. So essentially, these cycles seem to play a much bigger role on planet Earth than we ever expected. But once again, the foundation for these cycles is of course the result of gravitational interactions with a lot of solar system bodies. But scientists never really thought it's going to be smaller bodies like Mars and Venus. And so now we have this new study that reveals that Mars seems to exert a particularly strong and often surprising influence on the planet that was previously ignored. And so here by using the computer simulations and models and by essentially varying the mass of Mars compared to other planets and then tracking the resulting changes in the Earth's orbital evolution, scientists were able to discover exactly what Mars' role seems to be. And so first of all here the simulation officially confirmed that the most stable cycle is approximately 105,000 years. This is once again mostly driven by the larger planets. As a matter of fact, the cycle persists independent of other planets just because Jupiter is the most massive planet in the solar system. But surprisingly almost every other cycle seems to change dramatically if you actually change the mass of Mars. And so here by changing the mass of Mars from zero all the way to,000% scientists discovered that the orbital changes on planet Earth seem to actually be quite extreme. For example, when it comes to the cycles responsible for the ice ages, the 100,000 eccentricity cycles seem to actually heavily rely on Mars's gravitational presence. And so in the simulations, as Mars became more massive, a lot of these 100,000year cycles lengthened and gained power.
Alternately, when Mars's mass was zero, these cycles weakened and became almost insignificant. And so, this potentially suggests that one of the main reasons we might even have ice ages is because of Mars. But here, this was not even the most surprising discovery. The most striking discovery was over a much longer cycle, 2.4 million years. This is a very long-term climate fluctuation and is a kind of a grand cycle when it comes to eccentricity and it seems to be tied to these slow rotation rates of Earth's and Mars' orbits and disappears entirely when Mars is zero mass. We've actually briefly discussed this in one of the previous videos in description, but basically here Mars seems to create an actual new cycle on a planet that we've never really known about before until some of the more recent studies. And so this grand cycle of 2.4 for million years only exists because of Mars and only because it seems to create the right gravitational resonance with our own planet and obviously our planet seems to influence Mars as well. So it also has its own climate changes because of Earth and then the last cycle the oblig cycle seems to be also sensitive to the Mars's mass. Here, the familiar 41,000year cycle seems to lengthen as Mars becomes more massive, with simulations showing that if Mars was 10 times as massive, the 41,000year cycle would shift, becoming the dominant cycle and dramatically changing the climatic changes on the planet roughly around every 45,000 years. This would actually dramatically alter the patterns of ice sheets and possibly even cause Earth to become an ice planet. And so in many of these experiments, scientists demonstrated that the mass of Mars seems to be the main controlling factor in driving a lot of Earth's climatic shifts because of these Milenovich cycles. With these findings showing us that Earth's Milankovic cycles are not just a product of our planetary dance with the sun and Jupiter, but is definitely a result of a lot of planetary interactions with pretty much most of our neighbors. And this is of course important for at least two main reasons. First, understanding these predictable climatic changes helps us establish highly accurate baselines for what we naturally expect to happen on the planet over the next few thousands of years. For example, studies using this knowledge predicted that the next ice age should occur in about 10,000 years from now. But by establishing these natural baselines, we can now start quantifying when it's actually going to happen because of obviously human emissions and a lot of additional climatic changes in the last couple of centuries. So, for example, we know that additional emissions of carbon dioxide and huge amounts of methane, both natural and artificial, seem to have already diverted some of this climatic shift from its natural course.
But at the moment, it's unclear if humanmade climate change is going to completely prevent the next ice age from happening or if it's just going to create some kind of a freak weather every year as a lot of additional mechanisms on the planet try to basically rebalance themselves and force the climatic changes to continue into the ice age. despite all of these greenhouse gases. So basically right now nobody actually knows what's going to happen. But this is why these studies are kind of important. And then at the same time a lot of these results also obviously tell us a little bit more about exoplanetary habitability because by studying these melancholic cycles we'll learn about interplanetary interaction and various planetary changes and learn to understand how a lot of these Mars type perturbers may shift certain cycles producing slightly different exoplanetary architectures.
And so for example, if we do discover some kind of an exciting planet out there, for example, maybe in the Trappist one system, we have to then start understanding how the additional six planets in the system influence that one planet that we now want to understand. And for Trappist one system where all of the planets are pretty close to each other, the Milankovich cycles there would be pretty extreme.
And so the main point here would be finding planetary configurations where we can in theory have a very stable climate the long term without any major shifts. And so for example, when we look at Mars, we know that Mars is definitely not the right planet. And that's because over time, Mars tilts its axis by something like 60°. Which essentially means that this particular planet would just not have stable conditions longterm and would unlikely to have habitable conditions for a very long time. And so here we're looking for a terrestrial planet orbiting a distant star, but that seems to have very similar orbital configurations and only experiences very mild climate variations that prevent dramatic freezing or dramatic runaway of various gases and basically does have seasons but nothing extreme because based on Earth we think that this is what's conductive for complex life. But ultimately based on this new study, we now have pretty strong evidence that even the humble Mars, which is very often overlooked when it comes to orbital shifts, seems to play a surprisingly important role in shaping the seasonal rhythms on our planet. And so here we're talking about the ice ages and the long-term stability of the entire planet. And that by itself is of course just a little bit surprising. But once we actually learn something else or once there are some additional discoveries about the melancholish cycles, we'll come back and discuss this more in some of the future videos.
Hello wonderful person. This is Anton and today we're going to discuss one of the most profound mysteries in all of science. The origin of life. Because for a very long time, scientists assume that life as we know it possibly started somewhere on Earth, very likely around some kind of a hydrothermal event, roughly around 4.3 to maybe 4.4 billion years ago. But recent discoveries and some of the recent propositions are slowly making us reconsider all of this because what if our true ancestors actually came from Mars or wait, it's actually right here. And so what if we are technically Martians? You know, kind of like the old saying, men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Although in this case, we seem to be all from Mars.
But in order to understand these propositions and in order to understand why this might make sense, we do have to go back in time a little bit and imagine Earth right after it was initially formed. So Earth 4.54 billion years ago.
And at this time, the solar system was extremely violent and very chaotic. This was not a welcoming home. As a matter of fact, based on a lot of evidence, we actually believe that approximately 30 million years after Earth was formed, it was then hit by a Mars-ized object referred to as Thea. This was the event that eventually resulted in the formation of the moon. And so, in essence, just after Earth formed, it had to reform again because of this very powerful collision. And if there was any life forming here, it must have been completely reset. Nothing could survive such an event. And so here for at least the first 40 million years it was extremely unlikely that earth had any conditions for life to form. Which brings us to the next concept referred to as a biogenesis. The natural process by which life seemed to have arisen from non-living matter and from simple organic compounds. And it's extremely unlikely that this was not some kind of a single spark event. It was more likely to be a slow process that created more and more complexity over time going from very basic chemistry that has been recreated in the lab many many times eventually forming self-replicating molecules which then led to initial cells and membranes. And we've actually talked about several experiments that have been able to recreate quite a lot of this in some of the videos in the description. But here there's a bit of a problem, the timing problem. So basically this is where the mystery kind of deepens. Scientists that use genetics to trace the tree of life by trying to find out when things evolved eventually discovered that everything seems to have started with a common ancestor, the Luca, the last universal common ancestor, most likely a very primitive bacteria or possibly a protoacteria that based on genetics seems to have existed approximately 4.2 billion years ago.
This is based on discoveries of bacterial fossils from billions of years ago and by using genetics to try to trace back the origin of certain proteins. But here, if you do the math, it looks like life very likely appeared on Earth only 290 million years after that moon forming event. And while this might sound like a long time for chemistry to turn into complex biology and to then diversify into ecosystem, this actually seems to be like a very tight window. which is why certain researchers started to look for alternative explanations. Maybe the neighboring red planet and specifically this planet Mars. But why Mars? Well, because of one simple reason. It seems to be slightly older than Earth and thus had just a little bit more time to do all of this. As a matter of fact, this planet formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago. And crucially, it did not experience any global melatin similar to Earth. And so when Earth was still a bowl of magma, early Mars potentially looked something like this. It already had a protective atmosphere, liquid water, and even geothermal hot springs, the locations where we think life very likely started. But more importantly, there is actually a chemical reason as well. And this is based on an argument from over a decade ago when Professor Steven Banner argued that early Earth was missing one extremely important ingredient in order to build RNA. In this case, RNA is actually believed to be the first genetic molecule to appear.
And to make it, you do need minerals containing boron and malibdinum. And it just so happens that early Earth was extremely poor in these elements or it was in the wrong chemical form and was extremely difficult to extract because at this point the planet did not have any oxygen and so producing RNA in this case would have been extremely challenging. But we know for a fact that boron was present on Mars for a very long time. And early Mars was extremely likely, much drier and more oxidizing, which implied that many of these life starting minerals were extremely likely abundant and widely available here and would thus create a higher chance for RNA to form. And so here the hypothesis suggests that life very likely started where chemistry was much easier. And in this case, it was much easier on Mars.
And in order to get to Earth, it then had to hit a right very likely on some kind of a Martian asteroid or meteorite produced during some kind of a collision. This is of course the idea known as panspermia. And for this to work, these early Martian microbes would have to survive a truly impossible journey by first surviving the impact that created the asteroid and by then surviving the extreme vacuum and radiation in space for at least several months. And lastly, they also had to survive the entry into the Earth's atmosphere. and the final impact on the surface. But it just so happens that based on several experiments on the International Space Station, many of which we've discussed previously, scientists are now pretty convinced that a lot of microbial life can easily survive most of these events. One example we discussed in one of the videos in the description, the bacterium scientists refer to as Conan, the bacterium, can pretty much survive any of this. And so technically microbes trapped inside the meteorite that was large enough could have been easily shielded from all of this even for hundreds of years, maybe even longer.
And so in that sense, at least theoretically, it does make sense. But despite of this, at the moment, there is still a lack of actual evidence. Okay, we do have some evidence from Mars, but none of it is definitive yet. In other words, there's no smoking gun for Martian life at this point. But a lot of rovers including Curiosity and Perseverance have discovered many different hints. For example, Curiosity discovered a three billion year old organic molecule inside the Gail crater that does have a very high chance to have been formed by some kind of life.
And more recently in 2024 and 2025, Perseverance Rover discovered potential bio signatures inside the Jezero crater and specifically inside the sample referred as Shiva Falls. We've discussed this in one of the previous videos in description because this was a super exciting discovery and right now it's difficult to explain unless it was produced by life. And so here these mineral patterns and organic compounds do suggest that some microbial life might have existed on Mars a long time ago. But there's still a chance that maybe it was really not Mars and maybe the Martian life basically came from Earth and not the other way around.
Mostly because back on Earth, we continuously find new ways and new locations where life could have maybe started in some very surprising ways.
For example, one of the recent discoveries suggest volcanic glass. This was something that was very likely definitively everywhere, mostly because volcanoes were super common back in the days. And here, volcanic glass seems to actually help assemble very long chains of RNA much more efficiently than anywhere else. Additionally, scientists also discovered simple ferrris iron that could have driven basic chemical cycles of life even before enzymes existed. So, in other words, the idea behind Earth being the origin of life is still pretty strong. But then I guess there's a question of why does this even matter?
Why spend billions of dollars on sending Martian rovers? And why would it even matter if we're Martian? Well, first of all, it actually tells us a little bit more about probability of life out there or basically the idea behind alien life.
If life started on Mars and Earth, in other words, if both started independently, it suggests that life out there is super super common. It basically means that many different planets and many different moons very likely host life and the entire galaxy is teeming with life. And it's only a matter of time before we find life complex enough to communicate. But if it only started once right here on Earth, it means that the transition from chemistry to biology is ridiculously complex and very likely super rare, possibly even rare enough to just have happened once. This is the idea referred to as the rare earth hypothesis. And likewise, if life started on Mars but then spread to Earth, this proves the idea known as Spermia and suggests that maybe life can exist on nearby objects.
But trying to transfer this life elsewhere might be super super challenging. In other words, maybe some star systems where life exists could actually have several objects teaming with life. But anything outside of that star system could still be basically uninhabitable. And so to answer the question of are we Martians? Well, at the moment we don't really have a definitive answer, but it is a serious scientific proposition and something that is being considered by several scientists. You can find some of their studies in description below. But in order to answer this question once and for all, we first of all need to collect actual samples from Mars, specifically those samples left by the Perseverance rover and then analyze them on Earth in order to get the exact answers. Now, since that mission has been kind of postponed or maybe even cancelled, that particular question is going to be difficult to answer for a pretty long time, which also of course means that we're not going to know much more about the idea of punermia or the true origin of life for at least a few more years, possibly even longer. But because this is such a fascinating topic, and because I personally have actually been exploring this topic for at least two and a half decades now, I'm definitely going to follow this up with the next video sometimes in the future. which means that you should definitely subscribe if you'd like to find out what the answer is sometimes later.
Hello wonderful person. This is Anton and today we're diving into something truly exciting. Something that created a lot of buzz online and something that was just announced by NASA only a few hours ago from when I'm making this video. because this time a team at NASA just made an announcement and released a new study possibly showing us the clear signs of past life on Mars. But obviously before you start picturing some kind of a complex organism or even green men, let's slow down a little bit and discuss exactly what was discovered and exactly what this means. But most importantly, we're going to focus on facts, avoid any hype and any overexaggerations because scientists have made this mistake before and made a premature announcement about Martian life which turned out to be not true.
And so let's talk about this new study and the new announcement in a bit more detail. But let's start with where exactly this is coming from and where all of this was discovered. And this is of course coming from the NASA's Perseverance. For several years, this rover has been moving across the Gzero crater in order to collect several samples and in order to possibly find life. And here this crater was chosen specifically for one reason. Researchers believe that this used to be some kind of an ancient lake and also very likely contained a river delta, both of which are environments considered to be prime targets in a search for extraterrestrial life. And so if life existed on Mars at all, it would most likely exist in some kind of a Martian riverbed. And last year in 2024, we've discussed this particular rock here. Perseverance discovered a very unusual rock referred to as Chayyava Falls. And it actually stood out because of these somewhat bizarre markings. They were referred to as the leopard spots with the initial scans revealing that it seemed to contain organic compounds that might have come from some kind of ancient life or at least showed us that there were clear evidence of liquid water in the past. And so life did have conditions necessary to exist. And it also contained these flaxs or these unusual spots of iron and phosphates from various chemical reactions that though could have been just chemical in nature could also have been produced by ancient microbes that possibly use this for energy. And we've talked about this in a lot of detail in that previous video last year that should be somewhere in the description. But now we have this very recent study that you can find in the description as well from Joel Huritz and the team you see right here.
Actually the team here is much larger.
So there you go. And this is a really interesting study. Now, first of all, this is really good science. There are no speculations here. There are absolutely no assumptions based on some kind of a preconception. And most importantly, this whole study is based on a null hypothesis. In essence, they're trying to prove that whatever they discovered is not life. But at the end of the study, the conclusion is that they're actually unable to do so. They don't have an explanation for what was discovered if it was not produced by life. But here, let's actually discuss the details first. And this is coming from a different rock sample from nearby sites called Sapphire Canyon and Masonic Temple. I'm actually kind of curious who even comes up with these names because a lot of them are super bizarre. But you can see some of these locations on this map. And so here once again, the samples were collected by Perseverance and were then analyzed and pictured. Although in this case, the analysis was not as complex as what we could achieve right here on planet Earth. And well, turns out that these samples contain minerals like vivianite, which usually contains iron phosphate, and grey, which contains iron sulfides. But what's really key here is how these minerals were arranged. Because on Earth, we usually see very similar arrangements in water sediments where microbes are physically eating organic matter and then breathing out rust and sulfates. This is usually referred to as redux cycling. And so the presence and distribution of these minerals in the Martian rocks potentially suggests similar biological processes that might have happened here before. And one of the scientists from the study, Michael, essentially describes this as something that would be very easy to explain if there was life, but something that would be extremely difficult to explain if it wasn't. So this was just a chemical or geological processes. It would be super difficult to explain. And this is particularly true because abiotic processes or the ones that are just chemical or geological can only reduce sulfates and sulfides extremely slowly and usually requiring temperatures of 150 to 200° C and also a lot of acidity.
But based on some of the previous research and based on the analysis of other rocks, these conditions were unlikely to exist in this location because there's no other signs of any kind of exposure. And so because there's just a lack of explanation for how this could be produced geologically or chemically in this case, this basically invalidates that null hypothesis implying that this could have been produced by actual life. And that's a pretty strong statement coming from NASA, especially because a lot of this was discovered in some of the youngest sedimentary rocks, suggesting that Mars might have been habitable much longer than we previously thought. And of course suggesting that this is a super exciting discovery, assuming of course it's true. And so here we have to discuss something else that's very relevant to all of this. This is not the first time we've been excited about potential life on Mars and not the first time such a discovery has been announced with so much funfair. And here our fascination with life on Mars goes way back even to the 19th century. And this is when astronomers mistakenly thought that they're actually seen canals on Mars leading to wild speculations about intelligent life, Martian life constructing all of these canals. But this was also partially the so-called zygeist, the spirit of the time. Around the same time, a lot of canals such as the So canal were also being constructed. And so here it would not be unusual to kind of assume that maybe something similar was happening elsewhere. And just as a slight side note, this also kind of reminds me how in the 60s and the 70s the STI program started to look for radio communication from extraterrestrial intelligence just because we kind of started using this ourselves and thought that maybe someone else is doing that as well. So it's always zeitgeist the spirit of time. But not only were these not real, they were most likely just a result of atmospheric illusions. Then in the 1970s we had the Viking missions. The lenders that performed actual experiments on the Martian surface and whose purpose was to try to find microbial life and one of the experiments called labeled release potentially gave positive results.
Results suggesting some kind of a microbial metabolism. And though this was super exciting, other instruments provided negative results with scientists later learning that perchlorates in Martian soil discovered by the Phoenix lander in 2008 could have destroyed organic compounds when heated, complicating the results from Viking.
And though some scientists still believe that this was maybe a discovery of life, but we just kind of basically killed it.
At the moment, all of this is very inconclusive. We've discussed this in some of the previous videos in the description. But then we have this. This was the biggest moment in history. The little tiny warm-looking thing that officially kicked off the field of astrobiology for many of us, including myself. And this was the announcement from 1996. The discovery that came from this asteroid that we know came from Mars with this very strange structure resembling a living organism discovered inside. And it was actually this guy that officially made the announcement in 1997, exciting a lot of scientists and a lot of people. But around the same time when I started studying all of this, luckily or unluckily, I also got involved in this. But under a professor that was trying to prove this kind of incorrect because he believed that this chunk of rock found in Antarctica in 1984 and that was confirmed to be from Mars essentially contained a lot of biochemical mimics. And so even though the NASA scientists led by David McKay announced that they discovered signs of life and specifically these microscopic fossils of bacteria with the formal announcement being made by Bill Clinton, these claims not only were controversial turn out to be incorrect. First of all, all of this was ridiculously small. This was approximately 2200 nmters in size and that's much much smaller than anything known to us and would basically be some kind of a virus. And we know that viruses do not leave fossils.
Moreover, scientists soon discovered that very similar shapes, as a matter of fact, almost exact same shapes, could also be created by non-biological chemical reactions with all of this later being recreated in a lab. And so, even though this contained magnetite, which back then was believed to be a strong bio signature, later on that professor I used to work for along with several other teams were able to physically prove that this was not true.
Very similar magnetic formations were then physically created through inorganic processes and no life was needed at all. and all of the other organic compounds that were discovered alongside this turn out to be just contamination from Antarctica. As a matter of fact, several amino acids that were initially used to prove this turn out to be terrestrial contamination from the Antarctic ice. And extremely recently in 2022, we've actually discussed one of the most groundbreaking studies in regards to this rock where the scientists at the Carnegie Institution of Science definitively concluded that all of this was likely formed by geochemical interactions between water and rock. the process referred to as serpentinization. And this is basically where ignous rocks react with water and then end up producing textures very similar to a snake skin and also produce these very bizarre features that sort of resemble life but are definitely just geological and chemical reactions. And so while ALH84001 was a monumental turning point for astrobiology, as a matter of fact, this rock kickstarted astrobiology over time, the scientific consensus was that the features here were not proof of Martian life at all, just proof of very complex geochemical reactions. And so what does the story from this particular meteorite tell us about the announcement that was just made by NASA? Well, it of course tells us to be super cautious and once again to be scientifically rigorous and honestly I think this study right here does a pretty good job at that as well.
But it still means we need more studies.
Right now NASA is calling this potential bio signatures here. The emphasis is on potential. This might be biological in nature but it also might be once again some kind of a reaction that has not been explored yet. And so while the evidence from perseverance right now is pretty strong, mostly because the observed conditions don't easily fit non-biological explanations like for example high temperature or acidity because the rover's instruments do not have enough capability to analyze these rocks more. We're not going to have an actual conclusion for a very long time.
And so, as Katie Stack Morgan, the Perseverance Project scientist, stated, "Right now, abiotic explanations for what we see in these rocks are less likely, but we still cannot rule them out, even based on the paper's findings.
Which is why we need that other mission, the Mars sample return. The mission that was supposed to happen, but then ran into the funding trouble, and at this point, we don't really know what's going to happen. The original plan was for this to happen in 2032, but at the moment, as far as I know, it's been postponed indefinitely. And so, the plan to bring these samples back to Earth in order to analyze them in our labs is unfortunately currently uncertain. And honestly, at this point, I think maybe China should just go in and grab these samples and bring them back because at least we'll have something. But the reality is that these missions are super expensive and currently the funding has been cut and so we don't know if it's going to happen. As a matter of fact, there's even talk about possibly cancelling everything. Meaning that all of these samples are just going to be collecting dust on Mars until someone in the future goes and picks them up or until Mars gets destroyed by the sun.
Although in this case, even that is not certain. It might survive. But in conclusion, what does all of this mean in the grand scheme of things? Well, first this reinforces this very important idea that ancient Mars could have been habitable and so it didn't just have liquid water. It possibly had all of the necessary conditions for life to exist. And so this latest discovery suggests that these habitable conditions might have lasted much longer than we initially thought because in this case this is coming from one of the youngest samples so far. At the same time, if these bio signatures are confirmed, it would have profound implications on life existing elsewhere in the universe. It would basically suggest that developing life on different planets may not be as difficult after all. And so if life arose independently on two different planets in a single star system, it may suggest that life is not rare, it may also suggest that the rare earth hypothesis is possibly incorrect and suggest that life exists in a lot of different places, including several places right here in the solar system.
But there's also this idea of panspermia. Maybe life started on Mars and then got transported to Earth, or I guess vice versa. And so maybe what we're seeing here are two different cousins that eventually ended up on two different planets, which of course would imply that we're basically Martians. And if that's the case, you would also show us that life is very robust and can travel far distances across space, which once again would suggest that maybe life did spread across a lot of different locations. And once again, we might be able to find it in many places. And finally, this idea also brings up the very important great filter hypothesis.
And so if the simple microbial life is common, why don't we actually see intelligent complex life as well? And so is there some kind of a filter that's stopping everything? And is there something really major basically preventing life from becoming super advanced? And if so, what is it? And so by confirming microbial life on Mars, we would now have to answer this new question. Either way, we're definitely on the edge of a groundbreaking discovery. That also reminds us of the power of science because here, the persistence of these robotic explorers and the persistence of scientific teams at NASA is the only reason this has even been possible. But here, the journey to confirm the life outside of planet Earth is definitely going to be a long one.
Even though we have these tantalizing clues and a lot of hints here and there, we still have to be very cautious. And that's because once again, we've made this mistake before. And so until we actually know what's going on here and until future discoveries or possibly some other research that manages to recreate all of this using just chemical and geological means, that's pretty much all I wanted to mention.
It's been quite a long while since we've discussed Mars. So here's your Mars update. And as always, let's start with the rock. An unusual rock discovered not so long ago. And so in this case, NASA discovered a unique rock now referred to as Fippsaxa. And by the way, if you're wondering, the name in this case refers to location in Norway, originally discovered on November of 2025th. And so here, this alien title refers to the fact that this is not from Mars. It's actually a meteorite, an 80 cm wide meteorite or approximately 30 in across, which looks very different from anything else in this region. And so by using the super cam in order to determine its composition, researchers discovered it rich in iron and nickel that's extremely common in metallic cores of large asteroids which basically confirms that this came from somewhere else in the solar system. But by itself this is not as surprising because quite a few have been discovered in the last 5 years except that by other pros or in other locations and so one puzzle here was why Perseverance has not found these meteorites sooner. it. It actually should have seen quite a few because the Jezero crater where it's currently exploring is the same age as other regions with other space rocks. And so I guess the answer is that maybe it was just not very lucky. But it finally found one. And here this is also important because one day we might have humans living on Mars. And by using these metalrich meteorites, this can actually serve as a source of raw iron used to build various tools or shields on Mars. And so definitely a cool discovery. But I guess also let's talk about some bad news. And unfortunately here we have two. Here we have to address some unfortunate news in regards to the ongoing mission and the mission that was supposed to launch. First NASA lost contact with the Maven orbiter.
This was back in December of 2025. And in the last 4 months so far nothing has been heard. The spacecraft abruptly went silent after passing behind the planet.
And this is a significant ball because Maven was one of the primary tools for studying Martian atmosphere and it also was used as a kind of a data relay for many different rovers on the surface.
And so for now at least this mission seems to have been lost. But what's worse is that turns out that the Mars sample return mission has now been almost certainly cancelled. This was the mission that was supposed to bring back 33 separate samples collected by the Perseverance, which by the way it's still doing. It's actually still leaving these samples on the surface, but due to massive budget cuts and ballooning costs, now estimated at almost $1 billion. The mission has effectively been cancelled in its original form. And right now, we have no idea what's going to happen to these samples. And while China is still planning a kind of a grab and go mission, that's very likely going to happen in 2032. What's actually going to happen to the pure severance samples right now is unknown. there is a very high chance they're just going to basically stay on the surface for many, many years to come. And so despite all of these cool animations NASA made over the years, unfortunately, we're not getting these samples back anytime soon.
Okay, let's discuss something more positive. Let's talk about some of the scientific discoveries in regards to water. And here, for a very long time, scientists knew that Mars once upon a time was very likely a kind of a blue planet. But some of these new findings actually show us how extremely earthlike it potentially was. Although here we're talking about the modern earth, not the earth back then. And some of this comes from recently identified cowite, a white clay mineral discovered in Jezero crater that you can see imaged right here. And while we know that on Earth cowite is only formed in environments with millions of years of extremely heavy rainfall, usually tropical rainforests.
And that's because it's produced by weathering what's known as felt spar.
And we actually know a lot about this particular mineral because it's used in a lot of different industries, ceramics, paper coating, pharmaceuticals, and even cosmetics. But deposits of this mineral are only located in very warm, moist climates. And so, as you can imagine, finding this on Mars implies that at some point the planet was extremely humid and contained an active water cycle. Now obviously we have no idea when exactly this was because we would have to collect these samples to date them but it had to have lasted for at least several million years. Furthermore mapping of river deltas on Mars and especially in the valley marinerys canyon suggested in northern ocean once existed on the surface of this planet and it seemed to have been roughly the size of our own arctic ocean. In other words, based on the visual analysis of these ancient river deltas here, it only makes sense if there was a huge ocean that was actually relatively deep as well. It would be extremely difficult to explain these formations unless this was formed by relatively large rivers. But the obvious question is, okay, so where did this water go? Here we're talking about a lot of water. And here at least one study suggests that there might be a surprising culprit, regional dust storms. Now, previously scientists actually used to think that only planetwide storms could be powerful enough to affect the atmosphere and stuff on the surface. But here, researchers found that smaller intense storms during the northern hemisphere summer can easily pick up water vapor into the upper atmosphere where then the solar radiation breaks the water apart, creating hydrogen and oxygen. And this actually allows the hydrogen to escape into space almost three times faster than normal. And so with a lot of these storms happening on the surface and because Mars doesn't have enough gravity, eventually all of this water that was evaporating instead of producing additional rains basically got broken apart by the solar radiation with hydrogen and oxygen combining with something else. But at the same time in regards to the modern situation when it comes to water here scientists also discovered that we might have been a little bit overly optimistic as in previous assumptions that there might be a lot of liquid water under for example the southern ice cap may have been slightly incorrect and specifically based on recent highfrequency radar scans researchers identified that a lot of these bright reflections that at first were believed to be possibly deposits of water were most likely just smooth ground mixed with layers of dry ice and clay. In other words, it makes the presence of actual water that was previously reported years ago somewhat unlikely. Now, dry ice and clay is obviously still exciting, but not as exciting as water. But beyond water, we also had a lot of research on the potential signs of ancient life or maybe even modern life that left these signs in a lot of different chemical elements and a lot of geological samples. And so a few months back in 2025, one team of scientists identified relatively longchain organic molecules referred to as alkanes. This was found inside mudstone referred to as Cumberland. And here you can actually even see how the sample was retrieved. And here this refers to a chain of 10 to 12 carbon atoms that at least on Earth are most commonly produced by some kind of a living organism usually as fragments of various fatty acids. And so here these saturated as cyclic hydrocarbons mostly composed of carbon and hydrogen mostly come from various natural fossil fuels and especially things like petroleum and natural gas. And all of this is of course formed by millions of years of decay of various prehistoric marine organic matter with them even being synthesized by actual organisms even today. And what makes this particular discovery somewhat unusual, is actually the concentration. Based on the amount of radiation this sample should be receiving, mostly because Mars doesn't really have a lot of atmosphere to protect itself, researchers found that the original concentration of these molecules was probably between 120 and 8,000 parts per million. And when they modeled non-biological waste to create this much organic material, none of them could explain its abundance. And so for example, somewhat could be produced by meteorite collisions or even atmospheric haze or like on Earth in various deep sea hydrothermal vents, but it would not be produced in these amounts. Here a more likely explanation is basically some kind of an organic matter. And while this is obviously not a definitive proof for existence of life on Mars, it is as researchers suggest a reasonable hypothesis. And so basically here we have another unusual clue for a possible existence of life sometimes in the past.
And by the way, we actually discussed the previous clue that was from a different sample and involved a different chemical reaction in one of the videos in description. And last but not least, we also have some really exciting discoveries about various electric effects on the surface, which actually presents us with some really unusual discoveries that scientists just did not anticipate. This of course involves the current Martian weather.
And here for the first time ever, scientists detected whistlers on Mars.
These are basically radio signals produced by lightning strikes on the surface. And well, you can see the data itself in this image. This essentially shows us a typical whistler that has been seen many, many times right here on our own planet, which of course confirms the existence of lightning on Mars. But because Mars lacks a global magnetic field, a lot of these signals seem to travel along small localized magnetic patches inside the crust. In other words, they seem to propagate in an entirely different way from how we usually detect them on Earth. But even more interestingly, Perseverance and specifically its microphone even recorded sounds of electric sparks, but in this case happening inside dust devils. And by the way, we're going to discuss more discoveries about dust devils in a video that's coming out really soon. But basically here as these dust tornadoes form the dust grains rub together and create a lot of static electricity which then starts to create these tiny sparks. And here this is not just some kind of a curiosity because they seem to be powerful enough to physically trigger chemical reactions and to oxidize compounds close to them.
Not to mention that they probably are also damaging to any kind of an electronic device on the surface. And so, at least in this case, this might actually explain why methane, a gas that's often linked to life, seems to completely disappear from the Martian atmosphere during certain periods. And though previous studies suggested that it could be a sign of life, here, a much better model suggests that is possibly due to massive amounts of storms that then create a lot of static electricity, which basically destroys methane. Not to mention that it very likely causes a lot of additional reactions that we just do not have on Earth because we don't have these electric tornadoes and so much static electricity. Actually, the moon probably does, but definitely not planet Earth, which also means that cats are probably going to hate living on Mars.
And then we have this somewhat strange and actually really unexpected discovery when it comes to the length of the Martian day. And that's because in the last decade or so, researchers measuring the rotation of Mars noticed something super strange. Mars is spinning faster and faster every year. Not by a lot, only 70 microsconds annually. But something was shortening the Martian day. And exactly what nobody knew. And to explain this, researchers had to rely on some of the older data from the inside mission that stopped working a few years back. They essentially wanted to model the planet's interior. And by doing this, they discovered a massive plume of relatively buoyant, less dense rock that was stirring deep beneath the famous Tarsus volcanic region with at least one volcano visible right here.
And here, this plume is moving upwards toward the crust, shifting the mass of the planet. So, kind of like a figure skater pulling their arms inwards to spin faster. And as this lighter mass moves toward the surface, the planet's rotation accelerates. And this is actually a pretty big discovery because it suggests Mars is definitely not geologically dead, but still seems to have enough internal heat to drive motion of its mantle and to maybe even one day wake up again and produce additional massive volcanoes. And so for all we know, one day, millions of years in the future, its climate and its surface may change again. And so in summary, Mars still manages to surprise us pretty much every year. From ancient tropical storms to the unusual electrical sparks inside its dust devils, it remains one of the most complex worlds in a solar system. But on that note, check out the links for all of the studies I mentioned in the description below. And watch out for that next video that's going to discuss additional discoveries from 2025 and 2026.
And it's about time we've talked about Mars once again. And as always, when we talk about Mars, I usually start with rocks. But this time, this Martian rock is actually right here on Earth. And that's because recently, this went viral. This rock was sold for over $5 million at an auction and basically became the most expensive meteorite ever sold anywhere. And so, following the sale, it made me reconsider my career choices. I might have to move to like Tunisia or Morocco and start looking for rocks as well. But I guess before I do that, let's finish this video and discuss some of the major discoveries from the last few months. And here is actually one from the Pier Serverance rover. Another bizarre unexplained rock that seems to contain tiny spherules and seems to be much darker than other rocks in the same region. Which means that this rock probably came from somewhere else and could actually be an actual meteorite on Mars or possibly an ignous rock produced by some kind of a volcanic activity a long time ago. And I bet that rock would be just as expensive. But obviously, we have a lot of other discoveries as well. Discoveries and findings from various missions that do paint a much clearer picture of Mars's past and even its distant future. And while over the years, especially based on some of the recent research, our understanding of this red planet has actually changed quite dramatically. And what we're learning so far isn't just about rocks and dust. It is about fundamental processes that shape the destiny of this red planet, but that also help us understand if life can exist anywhere else except for planet Earth. But as we know on Earth, life needs water. And so let's actually start with some of the water related discoveries because when it comes to Mars, this is still a bit of a ongoing question. And for many years, it was always accepted that billions of years ago, Mars was potentially much wetter and much warmer with various evidence suggesting that it hosted extensive bodies of liquid water which was potentially supported by a much thicker atmospheric layer very rich in carbon dioxide. And this is of course based on a lot of observations from the surface and studies from various orbiters around Mars. And so in one of the recent papers, scientists utilize computer simulations to discover that a lot of different valleys on Mars, like the ones for example in the Jezero crater, that's of course the crater where Perseverance is currently exploring, contain signs of hundreds of ancient lakes that were very likely shaped by heavy precipitation, most likely the result of rain or snow.
But naturally, this was a long time ago, 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago. And the patterns observed on Mars seem to align with models of distributed precipitation and not scenarios involving melting ice caps. Essentially confirming that rain and snow was very likely quite regular on Mars, at least in the first billion years. But the question of water on Mars today is a lot more nuanced, especially because there's been a lot of observations that was kind of difficult to explain. And researchers thought that maybe there is still water somewhere on the surface, at least as some kind of a really salty brine water that could potentially reshape the surface. And one of the biggest examples coming from the surface was mostly observed by various orbiters. It kind of resembles something like this or even something like this.
These really large dark streaks. They were actually discovered in so many different locations across Mars.
Officially these are known as RSL or recurring slope line and they seem to appear seasonally which to scientists suggested that well maybe this is some kind of a water deposit seeping through the surface and producing these dark streaks. In this case this would be extremely salty briny water because that's the only way for it not to evaporate and to exist on Mars. And naturally, this discovery created a lot of excitement, hinting at potential present-day hydraological activity and maybe even some kind of a huge reservoir of liquid water somewhere right under the surface. This could obviously be used to support a colony or more importantly could even support alien life. But these conclusions might have been just a little bit premature because a new comprehensive study that analyzed 500,000 such streaks almost definitely debunked this hypothesis because these seem to be produced by dry effects and not liquids. Here all of these streaks seem to be located slightly closer to various impacts and also usually experienced above average surface wind velocities and dust deposition rates.
Yet there was no relation between these streaks and various types of CO2 deposits or anything that could produce liquid water. And more importantly, they definitely concluded that there seemed to be no actual seasonal effects like previously stated with all of these streaks produced through some kind of a natural means, most likely as a result of Martian dust. But exactly how this is done is still not entirely clear. And so if there's no surface water here, where exactly did all of the ancient Martian water disappear to? Well, quite a lot of it very likely became different types of minerals or became trapped inside minerals and is now somewhere underneath. Some of it was also frozen in the polar ice caps. But there's actually apparently another unusual source. Recent seismic data from the NASA's inside lender provides definitive hints of vast underground reservoirs of liquid water somewhere around 5 to 8 km underneath. This was detected by listening to seismic waves from meteorite impacts and by identifying low velocity layers approximately 5 to 8 kilometers below the surface. This layer seems to represent highly porous rock filled with liquid water and resembling a kind of a sponge which by itself is of course a really exciting discovery and a discovery that's not so different from what seems to happen on our own planet as well. Planet Earth has a lot of water hidden underneath as well and potentially enough to fill several oceans on the surface, but still basically trapped inside the planet. And so this hidden body of water could account for a significant portion of Mars's missing water very likely enough to cover the entire planet with an ocean up to about 700 m deep. And this water seems to be in many different locations, but unfortunately is a little bit too deep to actually reach or to use for various colonies. And trying to reach this is just part of the problem.
Another problem is the fact that a lot of stuff on Mars is technically toxic to humans. For example, a lot of Martian regalith and a lot of the brainy water is permeated with toxic perchlorates, making this water basically unusable.
But a relatively recent project known as project Tatis, a project that was funded by NASA developed a really intriguing method of purifying Martian frozen liquid water specifically focusing on the removal of these hazardous perchlorates. This is a pretty intriguing project and you can learn about this in one of the studies in the description and essentially represents a somewhat important project for a potential future crude mission to planet Mars. Okay, we've discussed water. Let's talk about the atmosphere. especially atmosphere that would be rich in carbon dioxide which we believe would have acted as greenhouse gas to keep this planet much warmer before. But here we have this other question. Where exactly did all of the carbonates go? For example, here on Earth, all of the carbon dioxide usually gets sequestered inside rocks and becomes carbonate minerals, for example, limestone. This is a relatively slow process, but it's absolutely crucial for regulating the planet's climate over time. And previous Martian models also predicted something similar on Mars, suggesting that these carbonate minerals should be everywhere just like on planet Earth. Yet, orbital surveys and early roar investigations did not actually find almost any. And this was of course a missing piece of evidence when it comes to the history of Martian climate and the fate of its somewhat unique and somewhat bizarre atmosphere. But then we had a bit of a breakthrough. This was from the NASA's Curiosity Rover. After 13 years of exploring the Gale Crater, it finally made its first discovery of what's known as cyerite, a mineral that resembles something like this. And this is an iron carbonate mineral whose discovery on Mars serves as a possible indicator of a presence of huge amounts of water and of course carbon dioxide. But the discovery was a little bit strange because here it was found several centimeters below the surface and also inside the rock. It was also masked by highly water soluble magnesium sulfate salts which potentially explained why we couldn't actually see these minerals before.
These salts seem to obscure carbonate signatures from various orbital observations potentially explaining why no carbonates have been discovered for so many years. But the presence of cyrite definitively confirms active carbon cycle that was very likely operating on Mars for billions of years.
And so here we had carbon dioxide abundant atmosphere and of course water that created these minerals. But here there was one major difference between this and planet earth. There was a bit of an imbalance on Earth. Volcanic activity continuously releases carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
Essentially creating a kind of a self-regulating stable environment. Mars on the other hand did not have a lot of volcanism despite having the largest volcanoes in the solar system. Here's actually the picture showing us how big they were with one of them recently captured in this beautiful image. And so because of the lack of constant vcanism over time more and more CO2 was turned into rocks with less and less released into the atmosphere. And this imbalance meant that eventually Mars would become colder and colder and the water would eventually disappear which produced only brief periods when liquid water could exist followed by hundreds of millions of years of dry desert conditions. In contrast, on planet Earth, the long-term habitability is only possible because of the balance achieved between geology and constant sequestering of CO2. But naturally, there were some other effects, too. This was recently discovered by the NASA's Maven spacecraft. And that's because here, this NASA spacecraft recently observed what's known as sputing, a bizarre effect that potentially stripped the rest of the atmosphere, leaving Mars almost completely barren. And the way this works is relatively simple. It involves high energy particles from solar wind colliding with the Mars's upper atmosphere and then fleeing neutral atoms into space. So here's roughly what this would look like if we were to observe one single atom. And this was of course predicted for many years, but it has finally been observed by the maven orbiter with the direct observation here confirming this mechanism by observing atoms of argan and revealing that the spiring seems to occur at a rate of four times higher than previously predicted and being especially intense during solar storms.
And so without having some kind of a global magnetic field to protect Mars here, the atmosphere would be very vulnerable and would disappear after just a few hundred million years. And sort of related to this, we now have our first image of the first ever visible aurora from the surface of Mars. And here's roughly what this image looks like. It's not really that impressive, but here, this image from the Perseverance captured in March of 2024 shows us this very, very faint green light from excited oxygen molecules during the solar storm, which is actually exactly what we observe on Earth as well, but obviously usually much more intense. And this is of course important for science because it gives us a new way to study Martian atmosphere by literally seeing the atoms as they interact with the particles from the sun. Okay, enough about atmosphere. What about possibility of life? Well, even after years of research, most of this is still pretty much speculative. But there's one research coming from Earth that is kind of exciting. This was based on various extreopiles and even larger animals such as brine shrimp. Here's one of these creatures. And we really find these in various deserts. And so, could something like this maybe survive here?
Well, Artmia Franciscana or the brine shrimp has indeed showed us that it's quite adaptable to Mars-like pressure conditions, suggesting that in some sense it might be able to survive on Mars or at least similar resilient life forms could exist there right now. And at the same time, lychans or symbiotic associations of fungi and bacteria can easily withstand intense Martian ionizing radiation and even extreme temperatures while also remaining metabolically active even under simulated Martian conditions. In other words, lychen and maybe even brine shrimp could possibly survive on modern Mars. But it's a pretty big maybe because in order to continuously survive on Mars, they would still need liquid water, which they do require at all times. But right now, we seem to have at least four different types of creatures that can potentially live on Mars. We now have lychans, brine shrimp, naturally terrores, and even certain types of mosses. And that means that all four could technically be future candidates for Martian missions and presently can be used to model extraterrestrial life. But this doesn't answer the question of whether there is life on Mars right now. And well, the thing is there might be, but it's not from Mars originally. And that's because one of the recent studies discovered that some of the extreme bacteria were accidentally discovered before the NASA's Phoenix lander launch approximately 18 years ago. And these microbes do possess genes allowing them to survive vacuum of space and even some of the most extreme environments like the ones found on Mars. And so for all we know, some of them could have actually made it to Mars on these landers and might have even established themselves in some of the deposits nearby. But as before, at least for now, this is just a speculation. And so based on a lot of these discoveries, it paints Mars as even more diverse and more unusual compared to what we previously thought. A world of precipitation, rivers, lakes, active carbon cycle, and possibility of ancient life, but a world that possibly lacked certain geological activity such as volcanoes to survive long term. And though the search for life, either ancient life or present life, is still the main driver for most of this research. Since there is now a possibility of having actual crude missions to Mars, some of these new studies are also exploring the idea behind human habitability with the focus on various extreophiles to essentially learn from them on how humans can survive too. And so here for many years now, I think Mars is going to remain an extremely important planet for science and possibly even become some kind of a natural laboratory in order to help us understand planetary evolution, possibility of alien life, and of course our own place in the vastness of the universe. But I'm sure in the next few months we're going to have so many more discoveries and possibly some discoveries that are even more bizarre than the ones discussed today.
Hello wonderful person. This is Anton and today we're going to discuss some of the major discoveries from the last few months coming from our red neighbor planet Mars. And this time some of these discoveries are actually super exciting and have not been expected at all. But as always, as in some of the previous videos from a few months back that you can find in the description, we're going to start this video with a rock. And mostly because Mars is filled with rocks and many of them are kind of bizarre.
And well, this is one of these bizarre rocks that was imaged in the early 2025.
This is coming from the Perseverance science team, and it's a rock now nicknamed St. Paul's Bay. And as you can kind of see, it does seem to have somewhat bizarre and somewhat unexpected features. Specifically, it seems to contain these really strange spheres a few millimeters in size, whose origin is currently unknown, and not all of them are entirely spherical either. Some of them seem to be elongated. Some of them seem to possess angular edges and some have been broken in the past. As a matter of fact, some of them seem to even have tiny holes. And right now, the mystery is of course their formation.
Now on Earth, if we find sphererals, they can actually form in a lot of different ways. But microsphererals are usually associated with some kind of a volcanic eruption followed by rapid cooling as tiny droplets from the volcanic eruption first melt and then condense into these spherical formations. And so here one potential explanation is maybe some kind of a powerful impact from for example an asteroid that potentially produced a lot of droplets that then formed this rock.
But I guess one problem here is that they are kind of large and also not entirely spherical and so explaining all of them might be kind of challenging.
Alternatively, they might be similar to the famous Martian blueberries discovered back in 2004 by the Opportunity Rover or bizarre spirals pictured by Curiosity inside the Yellow Knife Bay. Or maybe all three are entirely different and potentially formed through processes we still don't understand. And so in essence, the formation mechanism in this case, if figured out, would have a huge implication for our understanding of the Martian processes and what Mars was possibly like back in the days. And this wasn't actually even the only rock that was recently in the news because a few weeks before this, one of the images from the Jezro crater taken by Deep Pierce revealed another bizarre rock and mostly bizarre because it just looked out of place. And that's actually the thing about a lot of rocks on Mars. they often seem to end up in a completely different place through processes we're still trying to understand. Now, some of this could be the result of erosion and wind activity, but in many cases, this can also be just the result of ancient water activity that we know existed on Mars. Anyway, because this was such an odd rock, the Perseverance team decided to investigate it by conducting a much more thorough analysis using what's known as LIBS, laser induced breakdown spectroscopy. basically a tool that fires a laser at the mineral and then analyzes the light coming from the mineral which reveals elemental composition. And here the main composition seems to be the mineral called cowite, a relatively soft and white silicut clay mineral that seems to be just a little bit different from the one we find on Earth. On Earth, this mineral can only form in temperate wet conditions. So basically conditions that we usually associate with conditions required for life. And right now out of thousands of different minerals discovered on Mars, this one is actually super exciting. Now there were some other minerals of course including spinal or a magnesium aluminium gemstone. But that one can actually form in ignous and metamorphic environments.
So it's not as exciting. And because on Earth we usually find these minerals in locations with intense rainfall or in many cases in hydrothermal environments.
This by itself is kind of exciting.
exciting because it once again highlights that at least at some point Mars at least in some locations had conditions not so different from modern Earth or at least had conditions somewhere where technically life could develop. And approximately 1 year ago, we actually discussed one of the previous discovered rocks that was super exciting because of these very bizarre leopard spots. The spots that a lot of scientists are now convinced were potentially created by some kind of a bacterial interaction. Mostly because if this was a natural reaction, it would actually require temperatures of 120° C or higher, which would not really make sense because of the location where this rock was found. And so a microbial reaction is a lot more likely. But this is of course just circumstantial evidence and would be difficult to discover actual microbes unless we collect these rocks. However, just a few days ago from when I'm making this video, there was also a super exciting discovery of something we've never seen before. A discovery of the largest organic molecule coming from the red planet. Now some of the previous simple molecules have been discovered before but this time the analysis from NASA revealed decane on decane and docane complex compounds containing 10 11 and 12 carbons that at least on Earth are usually associated with fatty acids.
Basically stuff we usually find in a lot of different cells. And since fatty acids usually form cell membranes as well as have a lot of other functions right now the discovery of fatty acids on Mars does not really have a very good explanation. Now technically it could be some kind of a geological process and possibly a process involving hydrothermal events in the past but it's also a bio signature. And so here we have several discoveries that essentially point at a potential microbe activity, but obviously still no tell sign that this is microbes and not some kind of a weird geocchemistry. As a matter of fact, chemical reactions on Mars might be just a little bit different. For example, surprisingly, it was actually kind of difficult to determine exactly why Mars is orangey red. Now, we know that it's because of iron and water interacting over time, but exactly what it formed was always kind of elusive. Or in other words, what kind of an iron oxide was formed as a result? And how and why was it formed?
And for a while, it was assumed that maybe it was some kind of a hematite or something similar we find on Earth. But recent analysis and recent very thorough investigation revealed something entirely different. By using several missions, including ISA's Trace Gas Orbiter, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and all of the rovers active on Mars, researchers almost definitively confirmed that the redness here comes from a mineral known as fairy hydride, a water-rich iron that usually forms in relatively cold conditions and in environments with somewhat neutral pH that we now believe Mars potentially had for billions of years. which means that when Mars became red, it was no longer warm or possibly never was warm to begin with. And this simulated Martian sample basically recreated the color very well.
This is ironrich fairy hydrate mixed with a bit of basel to make it appear just like Mars. And because fairy hydrates here seem to represent most of the iron oxides on Mars here, this is a really important confirmation for what Mars must have experienced for a very long time when it seems to have lost its water and when it potentially finally changes its color. So at this point it was very likely somewhat cold and drying out pretty quick. Right now the research suggests this probably happened approximately 3 billion years ago. But up until that point Mars potentially looked very different. Now, we obviously have no idea what it looked like yet, but there's a lot of evidence that it did contain very large lakes and at least several seas and oceans. As a matter of fact, there's been a lot of visual evidence of what seems to be ancient waves and ancient ripples and even ancient currents that existed on Mars before. And this is of course very similar to what we observe on Earth. In this case, this potentially existed 3.7 billion years ago. And based on the ripple size and based on the amount of current, researchers believed this body of water was probably not very deep, possibly 2 m or six feet in depth because the ripples here were pretty small. An average wave height was only 6 mm with the average wavelength of 5 cm.
But the biggest mystery has always been so where's the water now? What exactly happened to it? And why is Mars dry now?
Well, based on some of the observations from Maven, for many years it was believed that it was probably the result of the solar activity and specifically the solar wind that over time stripped the atmosphere and then very likely stripped the water as well. In other words, here the belief was that because of the solar wind and the lack of the magnetosphere, Martian water just kind of flew away. First, it evaporated and then the molecules probably became hydrogen and oxygen with hydrogen flying away and oxygen maybe becoming that iron oxide. But the thing is, there was a lot of water. And if a lot of water did that, Mars would potentially look entirely different, at least in certain locations. Yet, that's not entirely the case, as Mars does seem to have somewhat similar composition on the surface independent of the location. And so, in one of the recent studies, scientists actually discovered something super unexpected, something underneath the surface. In this recent study, researchers discovered that there is a huge deposit of water inside the Martian mid crust. This was actually done by observing a lot of different Mars quakes over time, mostly through the data from the inside mission and the seismic data from the inside lander determined something unusual seems to exist. 11.5 to 20 km beneath the surface. Here inside the layer of relatively fractured rock, there seemed to be a lot of evidence for the presence of large amounts of water. And not just like a little bit of water. Here, the scientists think it's probably an entire ocean of water that seems to be hidden inside. Here, there's enough water to create at least one large ocean on the surface of Mars. And yeah, there are some parallels here with the overall plot from the movie Total Recall. If you watch the movie, you might remember there is a huge deposit of water hiding inside Mars. So once again, science fiction predicted something that seems to be real. But because this water is so deep, it would be very difficult to access it or to even find out if it's really there through some kind of a geological mission here. Because this is up to a depth of about 20 km, it's definitely beyond our technical capabilities. Nevertheless, this is actually a really good explanation for what probably happened to all the Martian water over time. Here, most of the water definitely did not escape from Mars, but basically became absorbed into it. with this recent study basically explaining that Martian regalith is actually just really good at absorbing and holding water inside with a study simulating Martian regalith once again and discovering that unlike regalith on Earth, Martian regalith is extremely good at maintaining water inside. And though this is not a definitive proof yet, if proven correct, this would actually solve the mystery of Martian water once and for all and would potentially explain a lot of other mysteries such as the occasional presence of water vapor in the atmosphere, which then sometimes disappears and reappears afterwards.
Although here, I guess there's a small side note. Some researchers don't actually think Mars had liquid water, or at least not everything we see was a result of liquid water. Because based on mineral research, some scientists also think that maybe instead of liquid water, a lot of this was also the result of liquid CO2. Because the early Martian conditions could have actually allowed liquid CO2 to exist. And we obviously know CO2 seems to be still everywhere on Mars. And so in at least one experiment, scientists actually showed that liquid CO2 can generally produce very similar chemical reactions to what we actually see on Mars, especially when it's mixed with the liquid water and a few other chemical elements. For example, potassium chloride and manganese chloride seem to actually produce almost identical results to Martian meteorites.
And since the early Mars conditions might have actually been perfect for liquid CO2 and not for liquid water, at least one study presents us with counter evidence that liquid water is not even needed. A lot of Martian geology and chemistry can be explained if this was a mixture between liquid CO2, liquid water, and a few other salts. And this particular explanation right now does actually have certain benefits. Mostly because trying to explain a very large ocean of water is still a little bit challenging. And so when it comes to understanding what early Mars was like, there are still quite a lot of unanswered questions. Questions that could be best answered if we of course went there or at least collected a bunch of samples and then brought them back to Earth. Well, right now based on the presence of carbonates, phyocyicates and sulfates, this research seemed to point at a much more diverse liquid environment and not just liquid water.
But we also had some research in regards to certain phenomena on Mars that are both surprising and can also be potentially dangerous for future astronauts and both of them are somewhat unexpected. First one is in regards to the famous dust devils. This by now has become a very well-known phenomenon on Mars because Mars seems to have so many dust devils everywhere. And in the last video, we even talked about a lot of marks that they seem to leave everywhere that are even visible from space. And so these tiny Martian whirlwinds, though not being as powerful as on Earth, seem to pose their own danger that nobody expected. And this was recently discovered by listening to the sounds they produce, especially as they actually passed one of the rovers back in 2021. And so here by listening to these events, researchers discovered unusual cracks. Cracks that seem to happen every single time and that now have been explained as basically electric discharges. And so because Mars is so dry and because all of this is basically dust, this fastmoving dust becomes so electrified that it starts to produce its own lightning. With all of this actually happening really frequently, several cracks were heard in just a few milliseconds. And so this phenomenon can potentially create a lot of static electricity. And this was then recreated in the lab as well. So basically scientists were able to recreate this including the production of very similar sounds. And well this is technically a new risk. It can be a risk for rovers. But it can also be a risk for astronauts or any habitat in the location where these dust devils seem to be pretty common. Here you essentially have this dust tornado moving relatively fast that though doesn't actually produce enough pressure, produces huge amounts of electricity that in theory can zap everything multiple times per second and potentially cause a lot of damage and injury. And so definitely quite an unusual discovery. And then we have the discovery in regards to Mars quakes. And a lot of this once again comes from the inside mission that was able to collect a lot of data over the years. And here what the researchers discovered is that for some reason there are thousands of unusual quakes on Mars only happen during summertime and they seem to be clustered in certain locations and seem to be also different from everything else. They always seem to have the same intensity and only happen in the Martian summer. And moreover, they only seem to be in the north of Mars, not in the south. And here we're talking about quakes happening up to 10 times per day, making the surface shake basically every few hours. Naturally, for any habitat, this might be a little bit problematic. But in terms of science, right now, this really has no explanation. Now, because this seems to be seasonal on Earth, we can maybe find some examples that are kind of similar, but they usually involve water. For example, during periods of increased rainfall, when the rock composition changes because it's wet, we do get occasional seasonal earthquakes. But on Mars, this doesn't really make as much sense because we don't really have rain here. And so unless this is something underground that we don't detect, wet rock here would not make sense. And so one potential explanation is that this is somehow related to the carbon dioxide ice that grows and retreats annually and could maybe cause some kind of an effect. Now previously it has been associated with avalanches in certain locations on Mars. But in terms of the actual location, there is really no match. One of these Mars quakes is very very far from a typical location for an avalanche. And so quite a bizarre and unexplainable mystery. But when it comes to these Mars quakes, there's actually a recent discovery that does explain to us that not all Mars quakes seem to come from within. Because a separate study discovered that many of these Mars quakes we usually think come from inside are actually the result of various craters. Or basically at least a handful of Mars quakes has now been associated with some kind of an impact that produced a crater a few meters across.
Now, because Mars doesn't have a very thick atmosphere, every single collision does produce a relatively powerful Mars quake. Once again, another problem for a potential astronaut mission. And so, at least 50 of these events so far have been correlated with Martian impacts.
But that would still not explain why they seem to happen more often in the summer and more often in the north. And so, here, even though some impacts could maybe explain a few of these, they could not explain a thousand that's been observed so far. which means that we still have some mysteries to cover in the future and some questions to answer about the red planet.
So, here I was trying to make some kind of a super interesting video about Martian scientific discoveries when everyone on the internet started to talk about yet another unusual image from the surface of Mars. That's probably aliens or extraterrestrial intelligence building structures on the surface. All right, let's discuss these pyramids everyone's talking about and why it's probably not aliens and why it's just a geological feature. Hello wonderful person, this is Anton. Let's take a look at the picture first and let's actually discuss the Martian surface and a lot of different intriguing features on the surface imaged in the last few months discussing what we've learned about Mars in the process, but also talk about some of the dramatic shifts and dramatic changes Mars is currently going through.
But here's that image. This was trending on Twitter and a few other social networks for the last few days and obviously raised a lot of eyebrows. A discovery of what seems to be some kind of an ancient pyramid on Mars, I guess, maybe. Except that as always, this is maybe just a little bit fake. Fake because if you actually look on the bottom, there's also a link to some kind of a website which seems to be related to UFOs. And that's because this is not the real image that was posted by NASA a few days back. The real image looks like this. And though there is still a bit of a square shape in here, even here things were kind of processed. And so let's go take a look at the actual image posted by NASA, which you can find in the description below, and try to discover what's really there. So first of all, if you follow the link in the description, you'll notice that this image is unusually long vertically. As a matter of fact, you have to keep scrolling up and up until you find that shape we're looking for. And that's because Oh, yeah. Here it is. Here's that square.
And that's because this image was taken by the Martian Orbiter, specifically Mars Global Surveyor that's been here for quite some time and contains his Mars Orbiter camera that's able to take pictures pretty much actively as it orbits the planet. But if you're old enough, this image might remind you of something else. The famous face on Mars taken by the Viking one back in 1976.
This was obviously also very bizarre and very unusual and even led to at least one episode of the X Files. But as we've discovered within just a few years and especially by reconstructing the structure in three dimensions, there was no face. It was just a very bizarre mountain, which is pretty much the same thing here. This might resemble some kind of a square or even some kind of a buried pyramid. But if you look closer, you'll notice that it's far from being a perfect square and actually does resemble a typical mountain range and a relatively small mountain approximately 3 km across. But then we get these fake edited images on the web and it suddenly becomes the center of everyone's attention. Obviously though, this is very different from this. And this is definitely not some kind of a buried alien structure. As a matter of fact, here on Earth, we even have natural mountains that look more pyramid-like and have also raised eupfologist eyebrows back in the days. One of the more famous ones is this, the Bizarre Pyramid in Antarctica. except that this is not a pyramid and scientists have visited this place many times because it's also very famous for a lot of different fossils. This is just one of the peaks in the Ellsworth mountains which have been very thoroughly explored and explained in a study right here that you can also find in the description. No pyramids, no aliens, no extraterrestrials, nothing but very beautiful mountains. And today we know that this is most likely the result of a very special type of carving through hundreds of millions of years of erosion. the result of what's known as free thaw erosion, which is basically when you have a lot of water and a lot of snow go through its cycles for many, many years. And specifically, when water and tiny pieces of snow fill cracks inside the mountain and then freeze at night with the ice expanding and slowly breaking the mountain apart, this basically causes gaps inside the rock to grow larger and larger over time, resulting in a lot of pressure that slowly breaks the mountain apart, forming these bizarre shapes. And we know this freeze thaw phenomenon exists in a lot of places. Here's another famous mountain matter horn formed in a very similar way. And so likewise, this is also a result of some kind of an erosion. But exactly what kind is obviously unknown to us. And that's because Mars is just very different from Earth. Here the water cycle would just not exist. And instead, we would actually have some kind of a carbon dioxide cycle that would produce different erosion. erosion that's most likely caused by both the wind on Mars and the transition of carbon dioxide into the solid form which then turns it back into gas when it gets warmer. Now, when it comes to wind, for example, we know that based on some of the recent Ingenuity measurements, the winds on Mars are much stronger than we thought.
Previously, the average wind speed was expected to be approximately 10 to 15 meters/s. But Ingenuity regularly measured winds at least double the speed up to 25 m/s detectable just a few weeks ago. And so if there are a lot of strong winds, we would obviously expect a lot of erosion. But right now, in the last few weeks, researchers have been actually observing Mars for this exact reason. We actually get to see a lot of these changes and a lot of this erosion in real time because Mars is currently going through its new year changes. It's going through one of the most active and even one of the most explosive periods when things on the surface start to change as the surface in some regions is warming up. And that's because right now this planet is getting more and more active as the spring begins. And we get to see many of these changes in pretty much real time. For example, the ice on its poles is changing, but so are the individual structures around the entire Martian surface. And that's because here, as I mentioned before, there is really no liquid cycle, but there is a CO2 cycle. And that cycle is just a little bit different. Instead of ice turning into liquid and melting here, ice just becomes gas right away and sublimates. And the sublimation on Mars can be a little bit explosive. Explosive enough to suddenly create huge geysers on the surface and transform the surface almost right away. And so here, as light shines through some of this carbon dioxide and heats up the bottom, it basically causes a sudden sublimation event where most of this ice suddenly becomes gas and then just explodes, which then creates these very bizarre phenyl-like formations coming from within Mars. And sometimes after these eruptions, they'll often leave these bizarre marks on the surface we refer to as spiders, mostly because all of the ice inside is now gone and the surface above it starts to crumble. And here's actually a really cool picture that you might have not seen before of what the scientists now refer to as Martian kidney beans except that here this is just Martian dunes with a lot of ice between them. These are basically frozen sand dunes on Mars in the northern hemisphere. And here all of these dunes are covered by a tiny layer of carbon dioxide which is kind of like frost here on Earth which actually stops the wind from scooping up the sand and prevents these dunes from migrating just like they usually do on planet Earth. So basically normally dunes are not actually stable formations they do move across the surface but very very slowly as the sand migrates but when there's so much frost they don't they freeze on the surface and stay in the same spot until the frost disappears and so during the springtime which is technically now all of this frost will disappear and the dunes will become mobile once again. And so sometimes in the next two years, none of this will be here and it will all look very different. And very similar changes are visible in a lot of other locations, mostly in the north pole. For example, here all of the bright spots are frozen CO2 that's now sublimating and spreading a lot of darker materials on the surface. This image by NASA basically shows us what most likely happens here, which basically means that Mars might be a lot less desirable to settle on compared to what we usually think. So basically here every 2 years you get these super explosive geysers also very likely extremely loud geysers that explode all over the surface as all of this ice sublimates producing this very bizarre terrain. And so even though spring on Earth might be more romantic and involves a lot of flowers and melted ice on Mars is just maybe a little bit explosive. It also involves a lot of frost avalanches where you basically get these huge chunks of CO2 ice crashing down from the mountains. Not to mention very powerful winds and even storms. But apart from all of these explosions and all this falling ice, there's also a lot and a lot of dust devils. Something that we knew existed on Mars for over a decade now because this was one of the first ones captured by the Martian orbiter. And here dust devils are essentially like tornadoes but I guess not as powerful. And while in this image you get to see their tracks or technically what the tracks of these dust devils left as they move across the surface and as they deposit dust in various locations where they passed. And this is actually an incredible image that we've never seen before that basically confirms there are a lot of dust devils on Mars. And they're always created when the surface heats up causing warm air to rise rapidly in a very similar fashion to tornadoes on planet Earth. And just like tornadoes, they can last for hours, travel for tens of kilometers, leaving a certain mark on the surface that in this case resembles various dust trails. And though this is unlikely to be dangerous to astronauts, it will definitely affect solar panels.
And depending on the speed of the particles may cause abrasion of some of the more sensitive electronics. So definitely a really cool picture and something we'll be hearing more about in some of the future studies. But at the same time, all of these changes on the surface and specifically the warming up of the surface is now most likely going to result in a famous Martian storm. And that's because in one of the recent studies, researchers investigated the surface changes and the onset of dust storms correlating the amount of solar radiation, especially in certain locations on Mars with predictions for the appearance of the enormous storms on Mars. With a separate study that used several observations from the Mars Global Surveyor that involved approximately 10 years of observations, researchers discovered that Mars tends to absorb energy slightly different depending on its hemispheres. So basically here, the Martian northern hemisphere tends to absorb and remmit heat differently from the southern hemisphere. We're actually going to discuss why these hemispheres are so different in a separate video that's coming out really soon. So do subscribe if you'd like to find out more. But essentially here the discovery was that there's a different excess of energy in the northern hemisphere compared to the southern hemisphere with all of this excess very likely causing the beginning of the storms and that's compared to planet earth where things are more or less equal and the energy manages to balance out year after year. But on Mars the energy surplus very likely triggers a lot of these global dust storms and very likely as a result of the southern hemisphere warming up. It essentially causes a lot of dust particles to suddenly start kicking up the storms as all of this extra energy has to go somewhere. And because these storms become so massive, they essentially cover Mars from the sun, which then reduces the solar radiation and eventually cools Mars down. And so just to summarize this, these storms seem to result from seasonal imbalances due to major differences in the northern hemisphere compared to the southern hemisphere. With all of the calculations and all of the details available in the study right here by Larry Guan. But all of these studies and all of these observations once again show us that Mars is just very very different. And though there are some similarities to planet Earth, there are still a lot of differences even when it comes to erosion. which is why we actually do find bizarre shapes like this, phenomena like this, or any of those other strange rocks discovered previously that we discussed in many videos before. But at least for now, that's basically all I wanted to mention. No aliens, no pyramids, just a lot of weather changes and a lot of erosion. And actually some conditions that are maybe a little bit too extreme. I mean, honestly, I would not want to be around when these geysers start on Mars.
Hello wonderful person. This is Anton and today we're going to discuss some of the major updates from planet Mars because it's been a while since we've talked about the mysterious red planet.
And we actually do have quite a lot to cover because we have the geological discoveries, the discoveries in regards to its atmosphere, and even the discoveries in regards to Martian water.
But as in previous Martian videos, let's start with a picture of a rock, mostly because Mars has a lot of different cool rocks. And so here we have an unusual picture of a bizarre striped rock. With the internet now calling this the zebra rock, but the scientists decided to give it a name Freya Castle. And the reason this rock stands out is really because it's just so different from everything else inside Jezro Crater where NASA's Perseverance mission is currently exploring. And so the explanation researchers have right now is that this rock most likely rolled away from somewhere else and just ended up in this location. But where exactly it's from and what exactly it contains is of course currently unknown. But this is not the only feature that was somewhat unusual discovered on the Martian surface. As a matter of fact, a couple of decades ago, completely by accident, researchers discovered this weblike rock formations captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2006. And these rocks seem to spend for many, many miles, but also potentially hold a secret to the missing water on Mars. And that's because these unusual spiderw webs are officially known as the box work. And we do have very similar structures here on Earth. Here's an example from the Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. And it just so happens that NASA's Curiosity, the rover has been on Mars for basically a decade now, is going to be exploring this region really soon. It's actually about to enter this region, which means that it's going to start exploring all of these rocks, potentially revealing secrets of where exactly Martian water went. And that's because boxwork deposits, at least on Earth, usually form when water reaching calides fills various gaps between rocks and then hardens before eventually eroding away. And so since on Earth we know this requires water and calcium, maybe something similar happened on Mars as well. And so chances for some incredible discoveries in the next few months is actually really high.
And that's on top of previous discoveries we've discussed in one of the videos in the description where the same rover accidentally discovered incredible deposits of sulfur and even signs of ancient waves. So basically, we know that these regions seem to represent locations of ancient water deposits. Speaking of water, we actually have some really intriguing discoveries coming out of asteroids as well, or specifically meteorites that eventually landed on planet Earth and were recovered in the last few decades. And here's one that's really intriguing.
Lafayette meteorite. This was actually discovered completely by accident at Purdue University back in the 1930s, and nobody had any idea where it came from, although there are some stories of someone recovering this while fishing a decade prior. And well, in the recent study that you can find any description, scientists focused on a particular mineral referred to as eating site that's usually present when certain minerals are affected by water. And well, it turns out these types of eating sites seem to have formed approximately 740 million years ago, which is super surprising because it essentially suggests that somewhere on Mars, there must have been some liquid water 740 million years ago or billions of years after we thought water disappeared. And because these minerals have to have liquid water in order to form, this could not have been just a result of some kind of a melting event where the water evaporated very quickly. Here the water had to exist for at least some time in order to transform these minerals. And so here the only explanation we have is that the water must have been the result of melting perafrost which probably melted as a result of recent volcanic activity which of course also implies there's a lot of hidden water inside Mars. We'll come back to this idea in a couple of seconds. And though at first some scientists suggested that maybe this was not a Martian meteorite and possibly came from somewhere else, a much more thorough research established that gases trapped inside of this rock seem to directly match Martian atmosphere as measured by previous NASA missions. In other words, this seems to be a Martian rock and it seems to indicate liquid water conditions as recent as 740 million years. So I guess a new mystery.
But then at the same time, we actually have even more evidence for liquid water coming from a very famous meteorite.
This is actually the oldest evidence we have for hot water flowing on Mars, suggesting habitable conditions and liquid water extremely early on. And here we're talking about the famous black beauty, also known as NWA7034.
One of the most famous meteorites coming from Mars, discovered in Sahara Desert in 2011. But we know that this rock is really old. at least 2 billion years old. Essentially making this one of the oldest Martian meteorites. But the recent research discovered something else super exciting. An even older deposit inside this rock that was dated to be approximately 4.4 or even 4.45 billion years old. And in this case, this ancient piece was a tiny zircon crystal. And inside of it, it contained direct signs of water rich fluids from when essentially Mars was super super young. And so here we have a direct evidence for warm or even hot water present on Mars 4.45 billion years ago.
Basically right after Mars formed and the only explanation we have right now is this could be the signs of hydrothermal vents. Ancient volcanic formations usually present in the oceans that today a lot of scientists believe where life on Earth potentially started.
There are some videos in the description that discuss this in more detail. And since hydrothermal systems usually contain ingredients for habitable environments, this is a really exciting discovery suggesting that early on Mars had a lot of chance to potentially start life. And because here they also discovered a lot of different elements like aluminium, sodium, and iron all present inside the zircon crystal. It implies active chemical reactions taking place in hot water conditions. Very similar conditions to what happened on early Earth. But the reason this is exciting is because it implies water existed here much much earlier than we thought. Possibly several hundred million years earlier. Basically giving any potential life a really high chance to form on Mars. But then we have another study that actually studied something that happened a few hundred million years after. Specifically about 3.6 billion years ago. Now, at this point, Mars already looked quite different, but it was actually still covered in sheets of water ice with a surface potentially resembling something like this. And so, here in a recent study, Peter Booer explores a mechanism which could have allowed liquid water to exist much much longer. And so, 3.6 6 billion years ago or almost a billion years after Mars formed. We think that by then it already lost quite a lot of atmosphere with the atmospheric pressure potentially being 60% of what it is on Earth today. And because of this drop in air pressure, something started happening to carbon dioxide that was basically all over the place. In much colder regions such as near the poles, it essentially started to freeze and fall to the ground which very likely started to build huge polar caps much much bigger than anything we have today.
But this carbon dioxide ice was on top of other ice, water ice, which actually created something really bizarre here.
This ice started to insulate everything below it, which meant that the water ice underneath was much warmer than it would be otherwise. And so by having this very strange thermal insulator, it actually preserves the liquid water underneath, allowing a lot of melt water to basically act like your typical rivers and even lakes. Technically, something very similar happens in places like Antarctica where we actually have lots of lakes under massive polar caps. And quite a lot of water would eventually leak from underneath these caps, forming bizarre ice rivers that potentially swashed around very similar to a typical lava flow, but would still contain liquid water underneath. And here, these rivers would eventually become even larger bodies of water, which to some extent are visible in various topological features on Mars. But because this would be also a kind of a cycle with the carbon dioxide very likely evaporating when it gets warmer during summer. This could have happened many many times for many many years eventually forming all kinds of bizarre formations visible in the Martian geology. And there's even geological evidence for this when comparing this to what happens on Earth. In this image, you actually see two different places. a Martian valley possibly created in this way on top and a region in Canada known as Divan Island visible on the bottom.
And here both of these regions were potentially formed by these icy rivers.
Dean Island is actually a really intriguing location that NASA often uses to study Mars mostly because a lot of terrain resembles Martian terrain. And so if the study is correct, it means that for many millions of years, Mars potentially had conditions extremely similar to what we have in North Canada.
basically a lot of icy swashy rivers that would very likely change every season. But the next question here is, okay, so what happened to all of this water then? Did it just evaporate and escape into outer space, or is it all stuck inside Mars? And the thing is, there's now a lot of evidence that it's actually still on Mars, but basically inside Mars. And this was recently discovered by studying acoustic waves collected by NASA's insight mission that was able to study Martian density and Martian composition by listening to different Mars quakes. And interestingly, in some of these discoveries, they actually found similarities to what we have on Earth in locations containing oil fields or underground aquifers. Or just to rephrase this, these seismic signs coming from Mars resemble very similar signatures to what we usually see on Earth when there's basically liquid underneath. Now, if it's actually oil, I'm sure oil companies are going to jump on this right away and probably be on Mars in the next 2 years or so, but it's probably water. And it seems to be inside ignous rock, such as granite, whose cracks are most likely filled with water at a depth of 11 to maybe 20 km.
And so basically water seems to have been absorbed by Mars over time and seems to be still inside Mars. But accessing this water might be a bit challenging. 11 km is actually deeper than anything we drilled on Earth. And doing so on a different planet would be very very challenging. But that also means that during some kind of a volcanic activity, a lot of this water could potentially come out and maybe even form some kind of a partial atmosphere on the surface of this planet. And that's I guess maybe the next question. So what happened to its atmosphere and specifically the CO2 atmosphere that should not be escaping Mars that easily? Now previous studies obviously established that there was a lot of CO2 before but it disappeared somewhere. As a matter of fact, it seems to have disappeared approximately 3 and 1/2 billion years ago during the major transition on the Martian surface. And here the hint is from some of the deposits discovered on the surface. For example, we know that Mars, just like certain locations on Earth, contains a lot of minerals rich in smack tites, a mineral mixture that can easily absorb a lot of different stuff. And so, in one of the recent studies you can find in your description, researchers basically proposed that it's extremely likely that most if not all of Martian CO2 is basically trapped in a lot of different clays and a lot of different minerals underneath Martian surface. And specifically, most of this carbon dioxide was first absorbed and then converted into methane in many of these clays all over the surface of Mars. And that's of course based on our experience on Earth. The clays on Earth do exactly the same. And so by assessing the amount of clay present on the Martian surface and by then figuring out how much gas it can store in total, they discovered that it can hold up to about 1.7 bars of atmosphere, which is most likely more than Mars ever had, which is actually really intriguing because it means that lots of the CO2 became methane that's now trapped somewhere inside. And we know that Mars does have signs of methane once in a while, which is probably when this methane seeps out of this clay and escapes into the atmosphere. And so according to this study, right underneath the surface, there are lots and lots of deposits of methane that most likely began as carbon dioxide billions of years ago. All trapped in these smacktites between various folds, which are usually very good at absorbing carbon and storing it for billions of years. And assuming the study is correct, we now have two separate studies suggesting that Martian atmosphere and specifically CO2 and Martian water are basically all still on Mars, but just stored inside. But the obvious question is where. For example, do we have any hot spots or locations where maybe there are some anomalies that could not be explained otherwise.
And well, we do have another study. And this one does find gravitational anomalies. And this is based on the first ever global density map of Mars that combined the data from the inside lander with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Express. And here researchers discovered 20 unusual dense blobs mostly beneath the north pole with some other anomalies discovered in other locations as well. And many of these locations used to be ancient seabeds with whatever this is being approximately 300 to 400 km per cubic meter higher than surrounding ground.
Now, obviously, it's unclear what these blobs are and what's inside of this, but maybe, just maybe, this is either Martian atmosphere, Martian water, or, of course, something else super exciting. In this case, there was also a confirmation of a really large blob underneath the famous Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system.
With this blob approximately 2,000 km across, and actually being lower in density, very likely being some kind of a cooled lava that potentially suggests that vulcanism could come back to Mars.
one day and so Mars could still be geologically active as suggested by some of the previous studies we've discussed in the video below. Okay, next mystery.
The mystery of Martian magnetosphere.
Now, this is not a big discovery, but it's still kind of important. Today, we know that Mars lost its atmosphere and eventually liquid water very likely because it lost magnetosphere and that's because Mars is just much much smaller than Earth. So, it's not able to maintain geodamo inside. But researchers always believed this happened 4.1 billion years ago. Yet the new study suggests that it was probably a little bit later with the evidence coming from the famous ALH84001, the meteorite that became famous because back in the '90s, researchers thought that maybe they discovered signs of life inside of it. It was not signs of life.
It was just a chemical reaction. But now a new analysis actually found evidence for magnetic field reversals inside this meteorite which the researchers now believe might have been the reason why in a lot of previous studies no magnetic field was discovered. It's not that Mars didn't have a magnetic field. It's just it was going through a magnetic reversal when the field almost completely disappears just to reappear a little bit later. With the conclusion here being that magnetic field potentially lasted until 3.9 billion years ago, allowing the atmosphere, liquid water, and possible early life, if it existed, of course, to survive just a little bit longer. Okay, one more mystery, but this time with a solution. You might have seen this from some of the previous videos or from NASA announcements, but these formations are known as spiders or Martian spiders. Very strange formations on the surface of Mars that don't exist on Earth. And though at first this was a mystery, researchers have now officially solved it. And they did this through a very cool experiment. The experiment that created a miniature Mars right here on Earth. And this is their artificially created spider. And so in essence, these spiders are created as a result of carbon dioxide ice, which obviously doesn't occur on Earth, letting the heat from the sun through with the soil underneath it, absorbing it and causing the ice close to it to turn directly into carbon dioxide gas. This is of course the process of sublimation. Here, carbon dioxide does not become a liquid.
And as this gas builds up, it starts to form Martian ice cracks, allowing the gas to escape. But as it escapes, it also brings a lot of dark dust with it, which then forms these very strange dark formations. And so here, by using what's known as a dusty chamber that's able to simulate Mars, scientists directly recreated all of this with the experiment also revealing that ice seems to crack much more vigorously as it forms between grains of Martian soil, which then cracks it open. And so a pretty cool experiment and a pretty cool confirmation of an old theory. You can learn about this in a study by Lauren McKon and her team. All right, we've talked about a lot of stuff from Mars, but there's maybe two more things I wanted to mention. One of them is in regards to sample retrieval. And as I mentioned in the previous video, the NASA's retrieval mission is currently on hold, and we actually don't know if it's going to happen. However, China basically said, "Hold my beer. I might come here first, and I might able to bring even more samples than NASA was planning." And so very recently, Chinese Space Agency announced that for its Tenwin 3 science mission, they were going to collect samples and bring them back to Earth from one of 86 potential landing sites. And because here they're planning to launch this in 2028, this mission would happen much, much quicker than NASA's mission. Unless, of course, NASA decides to put some money into this and continues with the mission as planned. And so, for all we know, China might actually be the first to bring actual samples from Mars. But I guess we'll find out in a few years. And then we also had some really cool images of what the scientists refer to as the cloud atlas of Mars. And that's because there are a lot of different cloud varieties produced in the Martian atmosphere. Now, this one here we've discussed in one of the videos in the description, but this looks really beautiful. This is the cloud streets very close to the North Pole near the large area that doesn't have any craters. And here's a really cool phenomena that you really only see on Mars. This is a dust lifting event that actually combines different clouds with dust being uplifted from the ground which then mixes together producing this really strange phenomenon. And here we have what's known as Lee waves also sometimes referred to as gravity waves.
This is a special type of a cloud usually formed by the wind when it meets some kind of an obstacle like a mountain. We obviously get these on Earth as well. Here's another example from a different location. And so yeah, here I just wanted to finish on some really beautiful images.
Hello in person. This is Anton and today we're going to discuss some of the recent updates from the famous Ingenuity mission on Mars or basically the mission involving the helicopter. The helicopter that as you probably know almost exactly a year ago finally stopped working. And though we've discussed this approximately a year ago in the video in the description, up until relatively recently, or actually up until just a few days ago, it was not entirely clear what exactly happened to it and why its blades seem to have broken. Because the only thing we knew for sure is that the blades were broken and it was unable to fly anymore. But it could do everything else and is actually still working and still reporting even right now. And so in this video, let's discuss the investigation that essentially took approximately 1 year that basically explains to us what most likely happened and why the helicopter broke. But I guess first just a little bit of a review. Here's actually one of the first prototypes for this helicopter from back in 2016. And compared to the real thing, it looked somewhat similar, especially in the design of its blades. And that's because in this case, the blades were designed to perform in extremely stressful conditions and were designed to spin very, very, very fast. But technically, this has always been just a prototype and essentially just a test mission. As a matter of fact, the plan was only to fly times from maybe 1 month in total. So basically, after a month, this helicopter was no longer supposed to work. Despite of this, for nearly 3 years, it was working just fine, conducting over 70 flights. And this was way beyond everyone's expectations. And more importantly, the data collected during these flights taught us so much about Mars. Actually taking us just a little bit closer to the idea of human exploration and the potential crude mission. As a matter of fact, as a result of this successful mission, the researchers have now been actually pushing for an even bigger and better helicopter that could even maybe collect the samples left by Perseverance. This is now referred to as the Mars Science helicopter and NASA scientists have already been working on initial designs hoping to launch it sometimes in 2030s.
But in order for that second mission to be successful, obviously engineers have to understand exactly what happened to the Blades of Ingenuity and why they broke. Here's of course that famous last picture taken by the Perseverance essentially showing us a broken helicopter, but I guess more specifically showing us that one of his blades was at least 15 m away suggesting a dramatic snapping. And so it took approximately 1 year and a lot of analysis to come up with several potential scenarios with the official NASA investigation now available in one of the links in the description. Here's actually one of the first videos released after the blades broke that basically used the shadows of the helicopter to confirm that the blades were broken. And not just one blade, but all of them, which was a very important first hint. And so, despite having multiple scenarios of what potentially happened now, the engineers settled on only one specific explanation. And so, here's how this goes. Prior to the last flight or prior to the 72nd flight, the last flight did not go as planned. The 71st flight was terminated early and it was not entirely clear what actually went wrong. And so as a result, the 72nd flight was supposed to be a basic test in order to see if the helicopter was still functioning. And initially all of the data indicated a successful climb and optimal performance during the first few seconds. This fight was supposed to last for just 30 seconds. So at first everything was going fine. But at some point, the helicopter lost communication with the Perseverance rover, which was most likely due to the loss of line of sight. Here, the helicopter was basically landing somewhere behind the hill, and the hill was blocking radio communication. And so, for approximately 2 days, there was absolutely no data transmission. But during the post-flight assessment, some of the initial images basically showed us that the blades were broken. This is actually that first image that we received sometimes around January 21st. And so by January 25th, within just 5 days, Bill Nelson announced the end of the mission. And interestingly, the location where the helicopter now rests is now known as Valinor Hills, a sneaky reference to Tolken's Lord of the Rings and the final residence of all the mortals. But in order to break these blades, something extreme must have happened during those last few seconds. And that's because, as I mentioned previously, these blades were designed to not break even under extreme conditions. And that meant that during those last few seconds, something caused these blades to perform way beyond their stress limit. And so based on the telemetry analysis, NASA engineers now think they know exactly what caused it. And that's because in order to navigate effectively, this helicopter was equipped with a very specific downward-facing camera that would take 30 pictures every second and then use machine learning to compare what the camera sees with a predicted location in order to adjust its position. If something doesn't add up, the internal guidance inside the helicopter would adjust things accordingly. So, for example, things like position, velocity, and altitude would instantly be corrected. But in order to navigate successfully, this camera always required some kind of a surface feature, such as, for example, various pebbles in order to detect where it was going and how fast it was flying.
However, during that 7-second flight, it just so happens that it was in a location where there was basically almost no features. It was a very sandy region inside the Jezero crater that as the image from the helicopter shows was just a little bit too empty and thus was difficult to analyze. And this has been a problem for the helicopter even as far back as May 2021. There was actually a major flight anomaly during this time when Ingenuity was unable to calculate its speed directly and almost crashed.
And following this, NASA engineers had to adjust sound algorithms in order to calculate velocity in a different way.
This time though, based on telemetry analysis, it looked like there was actually no surface features to track.
And so, Ingenuity could not determine how fast it was descending or even determine its altitude. And as a result of this, when it landed, it hit the ground way too fast. Very likely bouncing in the process, which then according to NASA caused it to pitch and roll, which triggered automatic response. And in this case, the response was a dramatic increase in the blade rotation. All four of the rotors suddenly started spinning really really fast, much much faster than their limit.
And that very likely snapped them at their weakest point, which is roughly around 2/3 of the way. And because in this case, all four of the blades were broken and all of them snapped at the same location, it implied that all of this was the result of extremely fast spin. So basically, the blades didn't actually hit anything, but just cracked as a result of centrifugal forces. But because they all snapped at slightly different points, now the helicopter also started to vibrate with this powerful vibration causing one of the blades to separate, eventually landing 15 m away. At the same time, all of this very likely overloaded electronics in the helicopter, which caused communication to drop and the entire helicopter to very likely shut down. But eventually, everything came back to power. It just now it could no longer fly. And so even right now, the instruments are still operational. We still receive a lot of data from the helicopter, but its main function now is essentially just being a weather machine. It reports on the dust and weather conditions and once in a while send us a picture of what's underneath.
It's actually already sent data over 50 times since the original damage and it's been sending data pretty much every single week, which means that this helicopter is now 4 years old. Although technically calling this a helicopter now is maybe a bit of a misnomer.
Nevertheless, considering that this was a super cheap device and was made out of parts usually used in smartphones, it basically confirms that we don't even need anything that's super hardened in order to work in harsh Martian conditions. But I guess what's even more impressive is that we now officially have our first technical report on a crash of a vehicle from another world.
Something that now is definitely going to be used for a lot of future designs.
And that future design is now technically known as Mars chopper. a concept that's now based entirely on the success of Ingenuity and that's most likely going to be at least 20 times heavier and is also going to be able to pick up things and even carry several kilograms of equipment in order to autonomously explore Mars without the need for any rover. It might be able to travel 3 km every single day and might actually cover hundreds of kilome on Mars reaching places and locations we could never dream of. Or at least that's the plan for now. If this mission happens, it's most likely going to be in at least 6 years from now and maybe even just a little bit longer. And that's because right now a lot of future Martian missions seem to be kind of on hold. Mostly due to the budget limitations and mostly because the priority is still basically the recovery of the samples left on the surface by pierce.
Hello person. This is Anton and welcome back to Mars. I mean, hypothetically speaking, and that's because today we're going to be discussing some of the most fascinating discoveries from the red planet, focusing on certain studies that were a little bit surprising, and a few more discoveries that were completely unexpected. And in previous videos, we mostly focused on the surface of Mars, exploring its endless deserts and its ancient river beds, with the main focus, of course, being the discovery of some kind of a sign of life. Today we're going to focus on some of the most profound secrets of the red planet that seem to be hidden deep within its core.
And so we're going to be diving beneath the surface of Mars, exploring strange structures unearthed by one of the probes working on Mars a few years back, but also compare them to something extremely similar we know exists inside Earth and something that has previously been associated with some kind of an ancient planet. And so in this video, we're not just discussing Mars. We're going to try to understand how planets are built and how they evolve. But as always, like in previous videos on Mars, we're going to begin with rocks and actually strange rocks. And I think this one was probably the strangest from the last few months. This was discovered by Curiosity and it seems to resemble some kind of a coralike formation. Although just so that we're clear, this is definitely not coral because we kind of know how this was formed and it's unlikely to have involved life. But essentially here you're seeing something that's just a few centimeters across and is a direct estimate that once upon a time Mars was wet and contained water.
Here water seeped through cracks depositing various minerals that eventually hardened. But then billions of years later as this rock was exposed to the current Martian conditions. Wind and sand blasting eventually eroded some of these softer surroundings leaving behind these very intricate formations.
And so this discovery highlights repetitive natural patterns across different environments that exist on Mars and of course exist on our own planet as well. And the thing is Mars Gale crater where the Curiosity rover is currently exploring is known to contain a lot of such unique formations shaped by ancient water and billions of years of wind erosion. And you can learn more about some of the previous discoveries in some of the videos in description.
Some of them actually even resemble flowers or even bones. But scientists are pretty certain they're neither flowers nor bones. Um, they're just rocks. Kind of like this little guy. And this one was captured by Pierce River.
It's now referred to as the helmet rock.
Mostly because I guess it kind of resembles some kind of a conquestador helmet. But for scientists, it's not really exciting because of the shape.
For scientists, this is exciting because of these unusual sphere rules, which normally can form either through chemical weathering, mineral precipitation, or even volcanic processes. And so, figuring out how this rock was formed is actually a lot more intriguing and a lot more interesting.
But right now, we don't know much about it. And unfortunately, Perseverance doesn't have enough instruments to try to understand how this was formed. But it might have once again involved water.
But apart from rocks, Curiosity has also discovered something else that's just as exciting for scientists. A really complex organic molecule. This was reported in this study by HS and Septton. But in essence, this was a detection of the largest organic molecule ever found on Mars inside a rock that was approximately 3.7 billion years old. And by itself, this is already pretty exciting. But we don't really know where this molecule came from and how exactly it formed. We just know that it contains a long chain of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Possibly similar to decane and dodicane, but could also be some kind of a fragment of a fatty acid, which is of course a key component for biological substances. And though this could be signs of past life, it could also have formed through non-biological geological processes. And so this is not signs of life. We just know that based on a lot of different studies, there seem to be quite a lot of these complex molecules on the surface of Mars. So, the chance for life is still pretty high. And in terms of possibility of life, there's actually been another really exciting study that has discovered something super cool.
Now, obviously for life on Earth, we know that liquid water is absolutely essential. No water, no life. But so far on Mars, no liquid water has been identified pretty much anywhere, and only water, ice, and water molecules have been discovered individually. But we have some really exciting discoveries from this recent study. Here, research suggests that liquid salty brines can actually form on Mars at least twice a day. Or just to rephrase this, there's a very high chance for very salty liquid water to form for very brief periods of time in certain locations and during certain seasons. And specifically, we're talking about calcium perchlorate brines, which can stay liquid at very low temperatures and can potentially support hardy microbial life or at least they do so on our own planet because we have very similar salty water here. And microbial life usually exists inside even thriving in certain conditions. And so based on this recent study and by using older data from the Viking to lander here, scientists demonstrated that brines could form from maybe about 30 Martian days at the end of the Martian winter as frost sublimates. In other words, there's a chance for liquid water to maybe exist sometimes. And so small amounts of liquid brine could be generated by the seasonal recurring frost. With this study also redefining our understanding of these transient liquids, emphasizing that in certain conditions, interaction between the frost and the salt in theory could allow liquids to form. And so when it comes to this proposition, I'm actually kind of curious to see what other studies are able to discover. But then we also have a discovery that's maybe a little bit more lightweight. Well, you can actually see right here. Apparently, a lot of Martian dust and a lot of Martian dirt is way more fluffy than what we find on Earth. And so generally a lot of wheels here get stuck much more frequently. In other words, for future missions, engineers are going to have to take this into consideration. Due to lower gravity and due to much fluffier dust, it's just a little bit more difficult to drive on Mars. But now let's discuss something from inside the planet. Because for many years, we pictured Mars as having very neat smooth layers. Layers that would contain crust, mantle, and core. But because of the discoveries from the inside lander, this view has now changed. And so here, by listening to over 1,300 different Mars quakes over a period of about 4 years, researchers were able to discover dozens of mysterious blobby structures hidden within Martian mantle. In this case, this was discovered the same way we usually find things inside our own planet. And so here, these bizarre structures measuring up to about 4 km across seem to represent much denser and much heavier surrounding material, implying that it's chunks made out of something entirely different. And because there were so many of them inside Mars, the lead author behind the study, Dr. Charlamumbus described these structures as ancient fragments with these blobs potentially being remnants of some kind of a colossal impact that very likely happened 4 and a half billion years ago during the chaotic days of the early solar system and very likely involved some kind of a protolanetary object that collided with early Mars with this impact generating immense energy melting large parts of the young planet but also leaving behind very large chunks of compositionally different material that's now stuck inside Mars in various locations. And if you've watched enough videos on this channel, you're probably aware of something very similar inside our own planet. Just like Mars, Earth contains its own blobs, but actually much much larger in size that we usually refer to as LLSVPs.
Large low sheer velocity provinces.
immense blobs trapped inside the mantle that we've discussed in some of the previous videos in the description and that we know seem to produce a lot of different effects on the surface of the planet including various types of vulcanism. And since their origin has been kind of linked to a huge collision between early Earth and a planet known as Thea, we can assume that something very similar potentially happened on Mars. But because these blobs are so much larger than the ones on Mars, here we can conclude that the collision on Mars was potentially much much smaller.
On Earth, this represents approximately 8% of the entire mantle. But there's obviously one more important difference.
Compared to Earth, Mars is also geologically still. It's basically a single plate planet that does not contain any plate tectonics. And Martian crust very likely solidified very early, forming what the scientists refer to as a stagnant lid. And so the internal structure of Mars very likely evolved very slow and potentially has not changed much over time. Whereas on Earth, these structures would have already been recycled and changed dramatically. And so most of this would look very differently. And so these blobs on Mars seem to have been preserved for billions of years and are now more or less inert and don't seem to affect Mars much. In essence, the Martian blobs are the fossil remnants from its violent birth, representing a kind of an unchanging record of some of the earliest moments in the history of Mars. But for Earth, LLVPs are active participants and seem to affect Earth's geological processes at all times. And more importantly, they seem to affect Earth in so many other ways. Once again, if you want to learn more, check out the previous video in the description. But I guess the question is, why did Earth and Mars evolve so differently? And why did they look so different today? Well, here we do have a few more hints based on the observations of the Martian surface and the differences in Martian crust. This is actually a relatively old puzzle referred to as the Martian dichotomy that refers to dramatic differences between Martian southern highlands which usually contain a lot of craters and is also much higher, actually several kilometers higher compared to the northern lowlands which are very smooth, very flat and much younger. And well, for decades this was believed to be maybe the result of some kind of a collision, which would actually also explain the blobs inside. But once again, the Mars quake data seem to show something a little bit different. By looking at how Mars quakes propagate through the northern and the southern part of Mars, researchers found that the rock beneath the southern highlands seems to be overall a little bit hotter than the northern lowlands. with this temperature difference suggesting that it was really the internal forces and not the external impact that potentially caused Mars to look so different with the models now basically explaining this as some kind of a geological activity very early on that eventually suddenly stopped or basically Mars might have had moving tectonic plates at some point with the movement of these plates and the molten rock beneath them creating the unevenness but it then essentially solidified and stopped freezing in place for billions of years. And this very likely happened billions of years ago and potentially doomed Mars to lose its atmosphere and its water. And so the mechanism that in this case preserved these blobs seem to have also created the overall shape of the Martian surface. And by the way, this is something we think might happen to Earth as well, but possibly like hundreds of millions of years in the future. But once again, Mars here offers us a kind of a snapshot of early chaotic planetary development that's now been frozen in time. Whereas our own planet is still geologically active and still constantly changing which is why it looks so different today compared to Mars and even Venus. But this also makes Mars unique for geology because its surface, its crust and even its mantle have become sealed for billions of years and remained largely undisturbed providing us with a very important window into the violent past that shaped the early solar system. And so by learning what's happening on Mars today, we're actually going to understand what happened on Earth billions of years ago because this is basically like looking back in time and might also help us understand what happened to Venus and Mercury, providing us with additional models in understanding planetary evolution and the potential chance for life to develop on various planets. And so hopefully the Martian missions continue and more importantly we'll get even more missions including some kind of a recovery mission that's going to bring back some of these samples because here it's not just exploring one planet. It's about piecing together the grand puzzle of planetary formation and also understanding the very origins of life itself. I will definitely come back and talk more about all of this in some of the future videos once there are some additional studies from Mars. Until then check out some of the previous videos in the description. Thank you for watching.
Subscribe. Come back tomorrow to learn something else. Support this channel on Patreon where you can find additional videos, videos without any ads and can DM me directly or by joining a channel membership that grants you early access and a few more things. Alternatively, you can also buy the wonderful person t-shirt that features Mars as one of the designs. Stay wonderful. I'll see you tomorrow and as always, bye-bye.
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