Where as you are being rather aggressive.

Let's try again, shall we?

You are trying to compare erosion and weathering here on Earth to that on Mars. A common mistake and understandable.

For example, you expect that the amount of dust being moved around on Mars by it's winds will be the same as here on Earth, and happen with the same speed and frequency. That's wrong. It does not.

You've also just discounted the weathering and erosion effects of Ice (which IS water, just in solid form), which you should not do.

I am well aware of the time scale of 1,000 million years (a billion). However you are failing to realize that given a material's hardness factor (called "Mohs" by the way when talking about rocks and minerals), or frequency when the wind does blow and contains that material. Even given a billion years, the same rock will not have a constant stream of very soft material blowing on it 24/7.

The MERs have only explored a tiny amount of Mars itself. While we've had many orbital probes that have taken very high resolution pictures of the surface of Mars, the fact remains that the MERs have only scratched a very small amount of the surface.

The fact remains that the majority of the surface of Mars does not have enough atmospheric pressure for liquid water. Water is present on Mars in the air and as frost/ice on the ground. It's theorized that there may be large amounts of liquid water underground where it can't sublimate into the thin atmosphere. The only place on the surface of Mars where liquid water has a chance of existing for any length of time is at the bottom of Valles Marineris because it is so deep and the pressure is greater there. That and if the water has a high salt content.

I can't help that you want to believe that a photo that you see of the surface of Mars makes you think that there is standing water there, even though it's been shown many times that it can't be because of how conditions are there, and the very fact that most of what you say is water, is in fact on a slope and defying gravity.

If you want to continue to believe that you're seeing standing water, that is just fine, as you made your mind up about it the moment you saw the photograph. I'm not going to try and change your mind, especially when you've obviously decided ahead of time that everyone else that says otherwise is wrong, seem to not understand how erosion works, or want to believe that you're being lied to.

However, I will continue to post for those lurkers and readers that are on the fence, or are wanting to understand Mars better (in a non- paranoid, non-conspiracy type of way).

What I do believe, is that they are going to find remnants of marine life in Mars past. Fossil shells, perhaps more, but my money is on the fact that Mars had oceans probably teeming with life, far, far in the past. We need to figure out what took away it's atmosphere.

C'mon now, don't let all the scientific knowledge you learned in school leak out of your ears. You know that with the atmospheric pressure of Mars, that no body of water could ever stand very long. It would look just like the effect of dropping dry ice (carbon dioxide) in water on Earth. Over in minutes.

You haven't seen the HiRISE images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter? They are so large and hi-res, your computer will be struggling to display them. hirise.lpl.arizona.edu...