Mars "Grand" Canyon Star of Dramatic Cosmic Image, page 2

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reply posted on 24-10-2012 @ 04:57 PM by kyle43

reply to post by wmd_2008

Comparing Earth without water to current day Mars does nothing to explain Valles Marineris though. I dont see anything similar on Earth

reply posted on 24-10-2012 @ 05:07 PM by heineken

i sometimes ask to myself if the canyon is related to the death of the red planet...

nibiru encounter?

reply posted on 25-10-2012 @ 10:48 AM by Soylent Green Is People

Originally posted by kyle43
reply to post by wmd_2008

Comparing Earth without water to current day Mars does nothing to explain Valles Marineris though. I dont see anything similar on Earth

This doesn't answer your question either, but if something similar DID happen on Earth 2 or 3 billion years ago, erosion and plate tectonics could have erased any trace of it.

reply posted on 25-10-2012 @ 07:51 PM by kyle43

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People

Which question are you refferring too. I do not think a 6 mile deep, 2500 mile long chasm could be obscured by erosion. Could you explain how plate tectonics could?

reply posted on 25-10-2012 @ 08:24 PM by Soylent Green Is People

Originally posted by kyle43
reply to post by Soylent Green Is People

Which question are you refferring too. I do not think a 6 mile deep, 2500 mile long chasm could be obscured by erosion. Could you explain how plate tectonics could?

Erosion on Earth could certainly obscure it over 3 billion years. That's a really, really long time. There have been whole swaths of land that went from flat plains, to high and jagged mountains, only to be eroded back to nothing again easily in 3 billion years (in fact several times have mountain ranges have risen and eroded to nothing over 3 billion years time).

The features we see on the surface of the Earth today are very, very young. Many of those features weren't even around just 1 billion years ago, let alone 2 or 3 billion years ago. Whole geologic features (such as mountain ranges, canyons, and oceans) have risen up, and gone away again many different time in 3 billion years.

Whole areas that were once the surface of the Earth are now under the crust because land plates slide over and under each other in the span of 2 or 3 billion years. There have been at least five major ice ages in that time, one of them about 700 million years ago during which practically the whole Earth was cover by ice sheets. Some ice sheets could be a mile thick, with all of that weight of the ice scouring the land beneath it.

The features on the Earth we see today are extremely young. The Grand Canyon began forming on 5 million years ago. That's a blink of an eye compared to 3 billion years. The Rocky Mountains only probably raised up about 75 million years ago. Again, they are very young.

The Atlantic Ocean wasn't even around just a short 150 million years ago. The Atlantic Ocean could have formed 20 times over in the past 3 billion years. In the middle of Africa today, there is a crack in the earth (the Afar Rift in Ethiopia) that will probably be an ocean in 300 million years -- tearing Africa itself apart.

Scientist talk about "Pangea", the latest time plate tectonics allowed for a single "super-continent". But Pangea was ONLY THE LATEST super-continent in a long history of super-continents, and was "only" 300 million years ago. If you go back 2 Billion years, there have been no less four different cycles of the continents separating and coming back together again. That is to say that there has been four different times in the past 2 Billion years that the Earth has changed so drastically as to go from separate continents to one super-continent.

A lot has happened on the surface of the Earth in 2 or 3 Billion years. There are probably no surface features that could have survived all that time through all of the geological changes and erosion. Something similar to the Valles Marineris on Earth could have been erased in 2 or 3 billion years.

edit on 10/25/2012 by Soylent Green Is People because: (no reason given)

reply posted on 25-10-2012 @ 08:27 PM by WanderingThe3rd

reply to post by VoidHawk

or water

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