Posts Tagged ‘geology’
The Best Measurement Yet of Earth’s Radioactivity Shows Half the Earth’s Heat Comes from Nuclear Decay
Previously, there were varying theories on just how much of the Earth’s heat came from radioactive decay, with many--accurately, it would seem--placing that value at about half of the roughly 40 terawatts of heat produced by the Earth. That heat drives convection currents in the outer core and give us our magnetic field, among other natural processes (tectonics come to mind).
The measurement was taken at the KamLAND detector in Japan, which has been tallying up the flux of antineutrinos flowing outward from the inner Earth since 2005 (it takes a while to gather a meaningful quantity of antineutrinos). And, as usually happens, the answering of one question leads to many more.
For instance, we now know that radioactive decay accounts for half the Earth’s heat. But what of the other half? Some can surely be accounted for by what’s called primordial heat--heat leftover from the Earth’s violent formation. But whether or not that could account for all of that remaining 20 terawatts is unknown (and some think unlikely).
So even though we now have a pretty good handle on how much heat comes from radioactive decay, we still have plenty of questions about the Earth’s makeup that need answering. Feel free to theorize in the comments below.
[Physics World, ]
Video: Icelandic Ash Plume Blasts Through the Cloud Layer, as Seen from Space
The animation below is stitched together from images captured by the US GOES 13 satellite, which is on an orbital path somewhat to the west of Iceland. For the purposes of snapping images of a massive ash plume blasting through the cloud layer, that positioning might be ideal, as with the horizon in sight you can get a better feel for just how high this plume is rocketing (it’s 7 miles up right now).
Still not feeling the magnitude? That blue line that appears in the final frame shows the outline of Iceland. Yeah, it’s a big plume.
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Dinosaur Digs, Particle Accelerators and Crash Tests: Eight Epic Summer Vacations
Not your rainy afternoon trip to the science museum
Dig for Dinosaurs
South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Various Locations
The tectonic forces that raised the Rocky Mountains also buried and preserved many dinosaurs. This makes the American West a playground for today’s fossil-hunters. The Field Paleo program at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology’s Museum of Geology runs several digs and welcomes visitors to participate in trips of four to 11 days. Options include hunting for Ice Age fossils in Oregon, stegosauruses in Wyoming, and marine reptiles along the Missouri River in South Dakota. Working with paleontologists, you’ll learn dinosaur classification and anatomy, and map and preserve your findings.
Trip tip: If you want to look for fossils in other areas, head to pasthorizons.com for more digs around the world.
Info: Trips run May to July; $600–$1,500;
Watch Disasters Happen (Safely)
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.
At Lawrence Livermore’s National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center, scientists use sophisticated computer-modeling techniques to predict and plan for nuclear, chemical or biological catastrophes. Visitors will view big-screen animated simulations of worst-case scenarios, including volcanic eruptions and the meltdowns at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. They can also take a bus tour of nearby Site 300, where LLNL researchers conduct non-nuclear explosives tests (although they won’t blow anything up for you—we asked).
Trip tip: At the National Ignition Facility, you’ll see technicians at the controls of the world’s largest and highest-energy laser and get the lowdown on the quest for hydrogen fusion.
Info: Free; ages 18 and up; for reservations, call the Public Affairs Office at 925-422-4599;
Head Into the Lab
Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, N.Y.
Researchers from some of the dozens of labs at Brookhaven, a U.S. Department of Energy facility, will guide you through the latest developments in medical, energy, environmental and national-security research. Tours run on summer Sundays starting July 17 at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, where scientists will demonstrate their work with electron microscopes and plasma etchers. Or check out the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), used for revealing proteins and other microscopic structures, and the nearly complete NSLS-II. At 10,000 times the strength of its predecessor, the x-ray will be one of the brightest lights in the world, enabling researchers to see ever-smaller entities in great detail. In August you can enter the 2.5-mile tunnel housing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to get a look at its 1,740 superconducting magnets and two condo-size collision detectors, and follow storm trackers in the National Weather Service control room.
Trip tip: Don’t miss the solar-powered bio-bus mobile lab, where you can get hands-on with sophisticated microscopes on loan from Columbia University.
Info: Free; Sundays, July 17–August 14, 10 a.m.–3 p.m. (first come, first served);
Witness a Car Crash
Kettering University Crash Safety Center, Flint, Mich.
At Kettering’s crash-test facility, visitors get to watch something being mercilessly smashed. Here, students and technicians test the strength and durability of automobile seats, seatbelts, airbags and other components. Using a deceleration sled that takes just 100 milliseconds to stop subjects moving at up to 40 miles an hour, researchers create 70 Gs of deceleration—100 times the jolt of braking in traffic. In addition to testing commercial autos, Kettering conducts occupant-safety tests for military transport vehicles and investigates things like how safe it is for a pop star to drive around with a baby in her lap. A workshop for kids allows them to create safety systems for eggs on a mini sled.
Trip tip: Be sure to meet Kettering’s family of crash-test dummies. Peek at the steel-and-rubber innards of dismembered dummies and, when they’re not being hurled into a wall, have your picture taken with them.
Info: E-mail Sheryl Janca or go to
Descend Into Darkness
Kansas Underground Salt Museum, Hutchinson, Kansas
A two-minute elevator ride brings visitors 650 feet belowground into the winding mines of one of the country’s largest salt deposits. At the Kansas Underground Salt Museum, 150 miles of tunnels connect 980 acres of mines, which provide 500,000 tons of road salt every year. On your way through, you’ll meander beneath 17-foot walls of sparkling crystalline salt and learn about the science and history of the mine, which opened in 1923. You’ll see how water droplets collect salt dust that builds to form hollow stalactites, or “salt straws,” which can grow to five feet before falling from the ceiling. Salt being a natural preservative, the tour includes relics such as the world’s oldest-known living organisms—250-million-year-old bacteria—and unusual items miners of yore have left behind.
Trip tip: Adjacent to the museum is a bonus feature: Underground Vaults and Storage, a two-million-square-foot archive that depends on the stable climate to protect seven million boxes filled with documents from around the globe, and the original reels of almost every movie ever made.
Info: Admission is $7.35–$18.25; reservations encouraged;
Study the Sea
Pangaea Exploration, Various Destinations Worldwide
Explore uninhabited Pacific islands, swim with manta rays, and add to our knowledge of marine ecosystems. For intrepid civilians who want to man rigs and mine data alongside a crew of scientists, Pangaea Exploration sells passage on the Sea Dragon, a 72-foot sailboat used for international research expeditions. The organization offers as many as a dozen trips every year, most of them focused on conservation or remote island surveys. In May, for instance, the crew of the Sea Dragon will perform an environmental survey of the Northern Cook Islands, then assess ecosystem damage in the Northern Line Islands. Spots are also still available—at $10,000 a pop—for the 20-day July 7 voyage to collect and analyze the plastic debris that is polluting the North Pacific between Hawaii and Vancouver.
Trip tip: Batten down. These aren’t luxury cruises—accommodations are spare, and participants must be in good health and able to lift a third of their body weight so that they can handle such crew tasks as manning lines and pulling in the sampling trawl.
Info:
Play With Robots
Roboworld at the Carnegie Science Center, Pittsburgh, PA.
Roboworld is filled with robots programmed to destroy you—at party games. With a paddle for a hand, Air Hockeybot 1000 uses an overhead camera to see the puck, while a 32-bit CPU factors in speed, direction, spin and friction to predict where it will go next. StarKick Foosbot operates on a foosball table rigged with infrared lights that let it track the ball. And then there’s Hoops. Originally part of an automotive assembly line, the robo-arm welder-turned-baller shoots free throws with 98 percent accuracy. Challenge him only if you don’t mind being schooled by an automaton. While you’re there, see Cye—sort of a hybrid of a Roomba and a bulldozer—work through an obstacle course, and watch AARON create original paintings.
Trip tip: Also on view are full-size models of inductees into the Robot Hall of Fame, including R2-D2 and C-3PO, several Mars Rovers and T-800, the original Terminator.
Info: Admission is $17.95 for adults and $9.95 for children;
Learn About the Bomb
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Oak Ridge, the Department of Energy’s largest laboratory facility, was built in 1943 as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. Driving tours of the 58-square-mile compound stop at Y-12 and K-25, two of the original uranium-enrichment plants established during World War II, and the graphite reactor where Enrico Fermi accomplished the first sustained nuclear reaction. Visitors will also swing by the Spallation Neutron Source, which produces the most intense pulsed neutron beams of any facility in the world and is used to study everything from superconductivity to the structure of virus particles.
Trip Tip: The nearby American Museum of Science and Energy features a cross-sectional model of a nuclear reactor, as well as models of nuclear weapons developed at Y-12.
Info: Free tours Monday–Friday at noon, June 1–September 3;
By Shining a Laser From the Ground, Researchers Could Easily Measure Earth’s Magnetic Field
Satellites, step aside
There are a variety of reasons for mapping the Earth’s magnetic field--geophysicists use the data to study the planet’s interior, oil and gas companies use it to hunt for energy deposits, and climatologists use it to study changes in the atmosphere. Studying the atmosphere, it turns out, should inform scientists about changes in the earth’s magnetic field as well.
The magnetic field of the planet at a given locale influences the rotation of the atoms in that locale, and by studying that spin with a relatively simple laser-telescope combo researchers can determine the magnetic field at a given place without consulting a satellite. Unlike satellites, the ground-laser setup isn’t in motion relative to the earth. Its magnetic readings also aren’t confused by other science tools the way readings can be marred when taken by instrument-heavy satellites.
Aiming a precisely tuned 20- to 50-watt orange laser at a six-mile-thick band of sodium atoms in the mesosphere (some 56 miles up) excites the atoms, causing them to fluoresce. The degree of fluorescence depends on the spin polarization of the atoms when the laser strikes them, allowing researchers on the ground to take measurements from which they can determine the magnetic field at that point in space.
At least, that’s the theory. ESO researchers who collaborated on the idea are developing a 20-watt modulated laser that will be deployed at the Very Large Array in Chile’s Atacama Desert to test the idea.
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New Atomic-Laser Compass Determines Direction of Magnetic Fields Optically
Researchers at Harvard wanted a compass not only sensitive to the size of a magnetic field, but also its direction. Such compasses exist, but they’re not great; the quality of their readings can be inconsistent, making them more or less an accessory but not a primary tool in precision work. So the team went to work turning some old rules of physics into a precision compass that uses magnetically sensitive atoms to make extremely accurate measurements of magnetic fields.
The compass consists of a domino-sized chip filled with rubidium-87 atoms heated to exactly 113 degrees. These magnetically sensitive atoms orient themselves in certain ways when in the presence of a magnetic field. To measure their orientation, the researchers shot a beam of linearly polarized light through the atom cloud. By measuring the light that came out the other side, the compass can determine both size and direction of the field acting upon the atoms.
While not the only compass ever conceived using lasers and atoms, it is the most accurate, at least according to the Harvard team that fashioned it. In experiments, it measured fields with strengths ranging from values lower than the Earth’s magnetic field to those stronger than a small iron magnet. It minimizes interfering noise that can throw off a reading, and its low power needs are superior to previous laser compasses.
That’s not to say a laser-rubidium compass will be offered on the next iteration of the iPhone, but with some further experimentation and tweaking such instruments could go a long way toward improving the accuracy of geologic surveys, earthquake prediction, and oil discovery in the foreseeable future.
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The Treasure of the Safit Chir
For over two centuries we have struggled to understand the scope of Afghanistan's mineral wealth. Now geologists, if they can determine what lies beneath the nation's ground, might also help bring stability to the surface
As we looked out over steep slopes dotted with purple delphinium, the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas all around us, Abdul Latif told me that he had not always been a miner. He had become a mujahideen commander after the Soviet invasion in 1979, he said, and he’d faced the enemy’s artillery and helicopters in these very mountains: land mines and the bones of men were buried out there, and older things too. Haroon, another miner, said that while he was digging a new tunnel several years ago he came across ancient buried walls, the chamber of a house made with neat stone masonry. He found a clay amphora there and smashed it in the hopes of finding gold, but it contained only dust.
Afghanistan’s “artisanal” miners, the gem-seeking equivalent of subsistence farmers, have been extracting and exporting precious stones for more than seven millennia; archaeologists have discovered lapis lazuli from Afghanistan in ancient burial sites as far away as Egypt. For the 3,000 or so artisanal miners working today, the job remains difficult. They have no property rights and keep their operations hidden from the central government, which in any case has little control over the region. Fatal accidents from blasting, cave-ins and avalanches are not uncommon, and the miners survive on a diet of stale bread, tea, chickpeas, rice and hashish, brought up once a week by donkey. In the summer they live in small stone huts with tarpaulin roofs; in winter, they move down into the mines themselves. For these efforts, they produce gemstones with a market value of about $2.75 million annually, and probably keep about a tenth of that for themselves.Haroon beckoned us to enter one of the mines, where the air was cooler. Crouching, he led us through a crude system of tunnels that he and others had dug with jackhammers and dynamite. Several hundred feet into the entrails of the mountain, he hunched down and pointed his lamp at a solid stone face. He placed his finger against a thin line of whitish feldspar. “This is the sign of the emeralds,” he said. He scratched at the vein with his chisel and then reached down and picked up a stone encrusted with a faint fuzz of green crystals. “You see? They must be close.”
That there is mineral wealth in Afghanistan is as obvious as the stone in Haroon’s hand. But no one knows just how much. The Times cited a newly arrived Pentagon task force to support the claim that Afghanistan possesses “nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits,” and the Afghan government itself puts it closer to $3 trillion. But such numbers can’t be found in any published scientific papers. “You can read every one of our reports, and there’s no dollar figure attached to them,” says Jack Medlin, the geologist who coordinated the 2007 U.S. Geological Survey work in Afghanistan that informed the Pentagon estimate.
“From what we can tell, someone took the estimated tonnage and looked up commodity prices for that particular mineral at that time,” Medlin says. “You begin to go through a multiplication and addition process, and someone arrived at a trillion-dollar figure.”
The Pentagon task force estimate also obscured another important fact: Knowing about something is not the same as having it. Geologists and mining professionals carefully distinguish resources—the actual amount of a given material that exists in the ground—from reserves, the amount of that resource that can be extracted at profit with current technology under current conditions. The Pentagon, however, had simply tallied up the current market value of all the minerals buried under one of the most rugged, remote, undeveloped and lawless countries on Earth.
The result, not uncommon in Afghanistan, was the promise of a rich reward with no accounting of what it would take to obtain it. The country desperately needs the resources to rebuild, but future investors will demand a far more careful analysis of the costs and benefits. If scientists can determine what really lies beneath the ground—what can be extracted under the challenging “current conditions” of poverty, chaos and war—perhaps Afghanistan can negotiate its own fate.
* * * *
The Soviet invaders, mindful of the political importance of natural resources, built a fine headquarters for the Afghanistan Geological Survey, on the eastern edge of Kabul, and 21 years after the Soviet withdrawal, the place is still being renovated with international money. When I visited one hot afternoon, workers were applying a fresh coat of paint to the stark concrete exterior.This magnetic anomaly indicates the presence of rare-earth metals.An area with low magnetic anomalies could contain oil or gas.High magnetic anomalies here indicate the presence of copper.Low density also suggests oil or gas, reinforcing the data from (2)The AGS is responsible for, among other tasks, measuring Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, and the World Bank, which has extended $2 billion in loans to Afghanistan, has taken an interest in the project. I was here to meet two of the experts the bank had sent to assist in the effort. I joined Klaus Steinmüller and Jerry Garry in the sunlit map room, crowded with plotting tables and geological charts, where they had been training Afghan geologists. What was it, I asked them, that made countries rich in minerals in the first place?
“If you’re a mining company, the first thing you do is, you look at the regional setting,” Garry said. “Is Afghanistan sitting in a highly prospective mineral belt? The answer is yes.” He spread out a chart that showed the major faults in the Eastern Hemisphere and swept his hand in a line from the Balkans down past India. “The Tethyan mineral belt starts in Turkey, runs through Iran and then into Afghanistan, and goes all the way across Asia to Indonesia. It’s renowned for holding world-class base- and precious-metals deposits.” Steinmüller broke in and jabbed at the map. “The Tethyan belt is one of the best-understood. But there are many other mineral belts. There’s another one up here,” he said, pointing toward Afghanistan’s northeasternmost corner, where the mountain peaks can reach above 25,000 feet. “Lots of precious metals. There are many other belts like that, but they’re not well-understood yet.”
The existence of such mineral belts and the difficulty in analyzing them both owe in part to the violent collision of the Indian-Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates, which began some 50 million years ago and which still pushes the Himalayas up by nearly an inch every year. That collision has made the mountainous regions of Afghanistan some of the most rugged on Earth—tough places for surveying minerals and fighting insurgencies alike.
The collision also drained away the prehistoric Tethys Ocean, even as it opened fissures that drew magma to the surface. This is, from the perspective of mineral prospectors, an enticing combination. Magma draws up heavy elements (iron, copper, gold) from the Earth’s mantle and, as it cools, also crystallizes into emeralds and rubies. Meanwhile, the prehistoric seabeds, laden as they are with organic sediment, promise significant oil and gas deposits.
“This country is rich. Everybody knows this,” Garry concluded. “But in order to understand this kind of mineral endowment, you need to undertake systematic exploration.”
* * * *
Afghanistan's potential wealth has long been studied with interest by its ruling powers. The first scientific exploration of the land came with British invasions in 1839 and 1878, and the first systematic surveying efforts began in the mid-20th century, when French, German, Italian and Soviet geologists, at the invitation of King Zahir Shah, traveled the nation on foot and donkey-back, taking rock samples by hand. It was the Soviet invaders, though, who conducted what remain the most extensive ground surveys: They used drilling, trenching, and field samples to evaluate 20 sites in detail, paying special attention to the large Aynak copper deposit south of Kabul and the even larger Hajigak iron deposit in the Hindu Kush. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, all geological work came to a halt. In 1995, as the Taliban massed on the outskirts of Kabul, the staff of the AGS did manage to compile most of the previous research, and when the Taliban took Kabul a year later, the staff hid the documentation in their homes, where it remained until the current occupation.In 2004, American and British geologists began training the staff of the AGS to conduct surveys using global positioning satellites and modern field laboratories. They also began entering the data from the old Soviet reports into computer databases, converting it to correspond to international data standards, and verifying the Soviet geologists’ original sampling material, thereby bringing that decades-old picture of Afghan wealth into greater focus.
Still, significant areas of the country had yet to be studied. A team of USGS geologists delivered a briefing in Kabul to the staff of then-ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, with a particular focus on the petroleum-producing potential of the Sheberghan region in the north. The ambassador’s staff, however, was more interested in knowing if there might be undiscovered wealth in areas that were seen as susceptible to Taliban influence. “The question was: Is there any potential for oil and gas in the southern part of the country? Because that would be critical,” recalls Medlin, the USGS geologist. The presence of natural wealth, it was thought, could attract large-scale development that, in addition to growing the national economy and enhancing the authority of the central government, might employ the people of that unstable region in something other than insurgency.The administration of Afghan president Hamid Karzai determined that additional research was needed and gave the USGS $8.86 million to get started. The USGS in turn solicited approximately $15 million from USAID and other international donors. The problem was that the most promising “frontier basins”—possible oil- and gas-bearing rock regions—were in the most forbidding terrain in the south and southeast, along the Pakistan border. No one from the USGS was going in by road. “These places being in locations where for security reasons you couldn’t get in,” Medlin says, “you need some remote instrument that will allow you to explore it from above.”
The answer was air power. But remote sensing, no matter how sophisticated, would still present major obstacles. The first was that no private surveyors were willing to risk their crews or equipment in a war zone. The solution: The USGS subcontracted the fieldwork to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and NASA.
The survey began with a series of flights by geologists in a Navy NP-3D Orion equipped with dual gravimeters and a magnetometer. Security was always a concern, especially given that the CIA, in the 1980s, had equipped Afghan insurgents with hundreds of surface-to-air missiles to use against the Soviet army. The Department of Defense required the pilots to fly at a standoff distance of at least 12,000 feet vertically aboveground and horizontally away from nearby mountain ranges. Since specialized survival gear would have been required for the crew to go more than 26,000 feet above sea level, the surveyors were not able to examine the 30 percent of the country that was more than 14,000 feet above sea level. It also meant that the survey results were less detailed. “You want to go lower and slower,” Medlin says. “Ideally less than 3,000 feet.”
For the second part of the survey, completed in October 2007, Air Force and NASA pilots crisscrossed the country at 50,000 feet in a modified WB-57 Canberra jet bomber equipped with a hyperspectral 3-D-mapping sensor. The USGS geologists complemented this overflight data with images from the NASA-run LANDSAT and Japanese-run ALOS satellite systems, and also with a series of radar surveys from a space shuttle mission in 2000.
In the end, the USGS remote-sensing project helped to confirm and expand on the older data. It indicated that the Hajigak iron deposit was much larger than previously believed and further suggested the presence of oil and gas deposits in southern and southeastern Afghanistan. But remote surveys can only tell you so much. The WB-57 Canberra sensor, for instance, could only create images with a resolution in which each pixel represented a square about 50 feet across—sharp enough to pick up useful data patterns, but still at best merely suggestive.
Ultimately, understanding which minerals are present in what concentrations in Afghanistan will require field research. Medlin says the USGS is hoping that Afghan geologists will one day be able to do that work themselves. “We are training them,” he adds, “because they are the ones who can get out into the countryside.”
* * * *
Back at the Afghanistan Geological Survey, in a half-renovated office down the hall from the World Bank team, Abdul Rahman Ashraf sat hunched over a desktop PowerPoint presentation, occasionally sketching on a pad of paper to illustrate the wavy lines of rock formations—clines and anticlines—that inform decisions about where and when to begin extraction. Ashraf spent most of his career as a geologist abroad, but now he is Karzai’s chief adviser on energy and mines. His job is to bring the country’s mineral-extraction infrastructure up to international standards. “This is Stone Age stuff they’re practicing out there,” he said, referring to the methods of artisanal miners like Haroon and Abdul Latif. “The blasting shatters the emerald crystals and damages their value. But people have learned in these past 20 years to go fast and take what they can.”
Ashraf hopes to change that by opening the nation to long-term investment in mining technology and infrastructure. At Peru’s Antamina mine site, for instance, miners on a 15,000-foot mountain ridge send copper and zinc ore on a conveyor belt to an intermediary plant, where it is crushed into a slurry that can be sent through a nearly 200-mile pipeline that terminates at the port of Punta Lobitos. Such systems are not especially complicated, but they are massive, and making them a reality in Afghanistan will require a commensurately massive investment.
Attracting such investment may prove the greatest challenge of all. Even by the turbulent standards of the Karzai administration, the Ministry of Mines has seen rapid turnover (there have been six appointed ministers since 2002), and it has gained a reputation as one of the most corrupt agencies in Kabul. In 2007 the completion of the largest private foreign-investment deal in Afghan history—a $2.9-billion contract with the China Metallurgical Group Corporation to extract the Aynak copper—was marred by accusations that one of those former ministers had accepted a $30-million bribe from the company.
Ashraf is quick to point out, though, that the company, which is owned by the Chinese government, had offered more in direct foreign investment than any of the other bidders, some $2.8 billion. It had also agreed to build Afghanistan’s first railroad, running from Uzbekistan through Kabul and over the Hindu Kush to Pakistan. In fact, the rapid growth of neighboring China and India could provide Afghanistan the opportunity to develop its own infrastructure, and ultimately to open up the whole region.
And the Chinese government has already funded the construction of a Pakistani deepwater port at Gwadar. India and Iran, meanwhile, are working together to build roads from southwestern Afghanistan to the competing Iranian deepwater port at Chabahar. It’s not the desire to defeat the Taliban, or the need for a political friend in an unstable region, or the hope for peace that will inspire such partnerships. It’s what’s in the ground.
And so real surveying leads to real investment, which in turn leads to real roads, real jobs and eventually—perhaps—real peace. But precise information about Afghanistan’s mineral reserves is still scarce. The Hajigak iron ore deposit, which at upward of two billion tons is the largest in Asia, is due to be opened for bids this month, but mining experts expect many years to pass before other major deposits in Afghanistan are adequately surveyed.
It’s hard to have patience after these dark years,” Ashraf said, looking down again at his careful sketches of Afghanistan’s geologic inheritance. “But we cannot make these things tomorrow.”
Matthieu Aikins is a freelance writer and photographer based in New York.
What Created This Smooth, 200-Mile-Long Trench On Mars?
The ESA says "the most likely explanation is that it was made in an oblique impact, when a small body struck the surface at a very shallow angle." Sounds almost definitely like aliens.
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