News

**SickScent** · (This post was last modified: 04-29-2012 11:14 PM by SickScent.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJMAcAJjb_0

Hundreds of large spirals have been discovered on Mars, and scientists think the coiled features are evidence of a type of lava flow never before seen on the red planet.

If so, the spirals would suggest that volcanoes—not ice floes, as other experts believe—shaped an unusual area near the red planet's equator.

Athabasca Valles is a region of flow channels and valleys covered with terrain plates, structures that show clear evidence of something fracturing and drifting across the planet's surface millions of years ago.

Scientists have been divided, however, as to whether the plates were made by the hardening of a massive lava flow or by icy "rafts"—much like Arctic pack ice—from an ancient inland sea.

(Related: "Lava, Not Water, Made Mars 'Riverbed.'")

Now, high-resolution pictures of Athabasca Valles from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed 269 coils up to a hundred feet (30 meters) wide.

"There are no known mechanisms to naturally produce spiral patterns in ice-rich environments on the scale and frequency observed in our study area," study authors Andrew Ryan and Philip Christensen write in a new paper in this week's issue of the journal Science.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/...rs20120428

**SickScent**

Sorry, can't get the vid to embed

**sword777** lop guest User ID: 88347 04-29-2012 11:06 PM

SickScent Wrote:

Sorry, can't get the vid to embed

Here you go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJMAcAJjb_0

**Faydra**

Interesting, but could animals have done it?
doomed

Like unseen giant snakes or something under the surface.
doomed

**Faydra**

look like they lay in pairs... doomed

**Nothing Is True**

**SickScent**

Kind of strange. 'They' say it is because of a 'newly discovered type of lava flow, and cooling.'

Wtf

**Useful Eater** lop guest User ID: 51645 04-29-2012 11:13 PM

Looks a lot like the petroglyphs on a large scale. After looking at the arrangement and in light of the quantity and precision of these formations I say their theories are likely to be utter B.S.

**SickScent**

Lurky Lew Wrote:

SickScent Wrote:
Sorry, can't get the vid to embed

Here you go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJMAcAJjb_0

thanks!

**SickScent**

Useful Eater Wrote:

Looks a lot like the petroglyphs on a large scale. After looking at the arrangement and in light of the quantity and precision of these formations I say their theories are likely to be utter B.S.

lmao, that is what I was thinking as well. The precision alone is pretty outstanding.

**Luvapottamus** · (This post was last modified: 04-29-2012 11:17 PM by Luvapottamus.)

Hmmm

Lava or Ice....

Hmmm,

Scratchinghead

I don't think so.

**Bagatell** · **Bagatell** user Variable User ID: 9614 04-29-2012 11:24 PM **Posts: 1,700**

Anyone got a NASA link for this?

**LoP Guest** lop guest User ID: 93550 04-29-2012 11:29 PM

We once lived on Mars. chuckle

Until it's time was up.

Same shit different planet. Hiding

**Everyone**

Bagatell Wrote:

Anyone got a NASA link for this?

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sci...anspirals/

**Useful Eater** lop guest User ID: 51645 04-29-2012 11:30 PM

In the still frame that starts that vid there appears to be a triangle inside of a circle, a set of intersecting perpendicular lines and a larger triangle in addition to the spirals. Lava did all of that? It's almost too funny, if our tax dollars weren't paying people to come up with this nonsense.