Mars Mission
01- Canals
02- Mariners
03- Riverbeds
04- Sub-surface Ice
05- Fleet
06- Martian Ice
07- Slope Streaks
08- Water Found
09- Phyllocian Era
10- Theikian Era
11- Siderikan Era
12- Martian Regions
13- Obliquity
14- Martian Tectonics
15- Topographic Morph
16- Crustal Magnetism
17- Original Impact
18- Polar Regions
19- Hydrated Minerals
20- Theikian Warming
21- New Phoenix Snow
22- Equatorial Glaciers
23- Ancient Ice
24- Continental Snow Drift

24 - Continental Snow Drift

Click here for enlarged diagram

 

To return to one of the premises of this website, that the evidence of former ice at Mars' equator is not due to shifts in obliquity, but rather to former plate-tectonic motion, let's compare the new snow evidence and the earlier mineral evidence of the newly defined Martian geological past.

The region in which Phoenix observed the snow is inside the present Martian arctic circle ( I say 'present' because I'm working on the basis that the crust did move in the past, in which case different areas of the crust would have fallen within the arctic circle during different periods ). If the regions nearer the equator that show evidence of water activity and ice deposits from the previous eras, the Theikian and the Phyllocian, are mapped onto my proposed pattern of crustal movement between Earth and Mars, they fall within the same general arctic region in which snow has recently been observed. This suggests that the equatorial ice was neither carried and formed in-situ, nor lay closer to the pole because of a sharper axial tilt towards the sun, but is in fact, due to those areas of the crust having previously lain within the polar region due to plate-tectonic movement.

TO BE CONTINUED

   
  Alan Lambert © 2009