Mars and the strange stuff.

[Mr. Oragahn]

What are your reasonable opinions on the various (more or less) unexplained elements seen on Mars' surface, such as...

1. The "tubes"?
2. The speculated vegetation, including what is interpretated as 1 mile large plants?
3. The caverns (large and dark holes on the surface)?
4. The very symetrical mountains?

[Mike DiCenso]

All of that is pure wacko nonsense. Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy website does an excellent job of debunking this:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoagland/

It's all a bunch of nonsense created by a guy (Hogland) who, if he doesn't actually believe it, is just selling snake oil to the gulible masses to make a buck.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

All of that is pure wacko nonsense. Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy website does an excellent job of debunking this:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoagland/

It's all a bunch of nonsense created by a guy (Hogland) who, if he doesn't actually believe it, is just selling snake oil to the gulible masses to make a buck.
-Mike

Sure, no surprise there's a bunch of very enthusiast and miswilled persons who have rather extravagant interpretations of these elements, but that's not my point.
I'm sorry, I realize that my OP was very misleading.

The thing I'm asking for is, what are the sensible takes on each of these things?

I'm not asking for giant space worms, aliens and mystical things. :)

I'm talking about observation, thoughts and personnal plausible ramblings, by looking at the MOC shots.

For example, geologicaly speaking, what those succesion of ridges, labeled tubes, could be?
I say tubes for a simple reason. Because it's just the way the absurd controversy made them be most well known. It's just a thousand times easier, instead of coming with a description that will be just as vague and tiresome as it can be. Just like the Nasa refers to a labelled area on Mars as the Inca City, just because, huh, it has natural geological patterns which are bit more ordered than the rest, that for some reason or another, made scientists think "Inca City!"...
And so, easily impressionated people thought it should be taken literally, or so. :|
Nevermind if it just looks like big cracks, around a small region, and looks like a portion of the ground around that place moved forth. Or like they say, it could be a mix of massive erosion and the remnants of a crater. Or a mix of all that. We just dont' know how old it is. We can't know how many changes it went through.

To return to the tubes.
The Bad Astronomy's take on them is the fairly simple and sensible. Never read it before, but it's basically what I had in mind, as far as we're looking for a most simple explanation. From the get go, I can't see how one would consider these ridges not to be in a valley of some sort. The shadows on the edges are so strong that they're just typical of your random rift edge, and it just so fits that it's literally baffling to think of the contrary.
And a simple look at the craters in the region would give a clue about the orientation of the sun at that moment.
Otherwise, we'd be talking about mountains which look like drops of mercury on a metal plate. Just completely nonsensical.

But what is more interesting is the formation of the ridges themselves. The complete shot just shows that there ridges can be found around, outside of the rifts, in less arranged and much more spread patterns.
Of course, cherry picking, and zooming on the single cropped section clearly makes the thing more impressive.
Even terran features can look organic, but it's less dramatic than claiming the existence of sandworms or else.

That said, the ridges are fairly large.
There are known ways to create such ridges. The most obvious one, for anyone who's midly aware of what a desert looks like, is that it's just dunes.
Big, clear, dunes of some sort.
Much like the giant sand dunes of Namibia, and their growing former "embryos" taking more than a thousand years to join the desert, after departing from the sea shores.
Here's a high altitude view of the desert.

Another possibility, but which seems a bit far fetched and requires too much luck, is that it could be about some form of seismic activity, where the soil got compressed in such a way that it created ridges, aligned such as on a crest.

Globally, there aren't many dune to find around however. It seems that most of those which survived time are stuck down the valleys, were the particles would remain both captive and protected from the storms at the surface.

I wasn't aware of the existence of that neat recomposition either.





Talking about silly sites, here's one to check out:
Mars Anomaly Research (that name!), run by another *cough* lunatic who's made a business on it. He has no known qualification in sciences whatsoever that can be verified, and sees lightbulbs, buildings and whatelse in various shots. It's mainly about alien stuff and NASA conspiracy (oh my god), and many "image tampering" claims that really make my eyes spin in my sockets at washing machine speeds.
Usually, it's a mixed bag of nonsense and attempted credibility, by pointing out fairly more reasonable, and actually NASA supported ideas, notably about signs of water presence.
Many of his arguments are along thosee lines:

Since I know nothing on Earth that looks like that (note: he didn't search a lot, since many martian features are very dune-like, or similar to Madagascar's and China's stone forests seen from above) then it can't be natural on Mars... precisely because I'm very educated in martian geology you know.

Surely, a good read for a good laugh.

However, as I said earlier, this site is an awful mix of pseudo science, crazy claims, bad observation and... sometimes, be it luck or just more thoughtful reasonings, more plausible and interesting studies, but still completely lost in a flood of once again conspiracy stuff that ranges from dark agendas, USA control and alien possessing technology to subdue our observations.
Uh-huh.


Anyway, let's look at the "giant plants":

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/m07_m12 ... 04688.html

Doesn't look like mountains, and if I'm not wrong, they're found around the ice polar cap. At first glance (it's always at first glance), they look like giant fungus of some sort.
It's hard to claim that this is an optical trick, where we're looking at crevasses full of dark dirt, apparently blown away by winds. Though it's very possible that there is darker material, no matter how you look at it, it does not look like packed craters, nor giant mountains ranges at all.

Could it be mesas of some sort, where the highest layer is composed of dark soil, due to a past volcanic activity or massive meteorite crash?
But what about the obvious branching patterns?
Each pixel apparently represents 5.5 meters. So that leads to pretty huge "things".
It's also known that these marks appear and disappear periodically.

Some say it could just be geological and chemical phenomenoms, where darker particles are pushed upwards, break through the soil, and spread from the eruption points.
That's probably, imho, the most simple explanation to avoid relying on a much more complex and SF bordering biological explanation.
Still, talking about giant plants is very tentalizing. A pitfall, of course.

The point is, with the lack of closer shots, and the utter lack of a good perspective, or a paralax effect, it's really hard to gauge the nature and dimensions of these.






As for the symetrical geological structures on Mars, in that vast chaos that are natural rules, sometimes the combination of many factors will look less natural, when it looses a bit of its messy/chaotic essence, and seemingly gains order.
Many people think of "natural" as "completely random", or so, and certainly not articulated in such a way that it could lead to results which are often attributed to human sciences.
Yet, looking at quartz and snowflakes, for example, should probably make these people think twice.
So what would happen if, for example, on an average, winds kept blowing in the same direction for thousand of years?
It's just very likely that dust will settle on both sides of an obstacle, while the rocky walls on each side will be vaguely equally eroded. Enough to look vaguely symetrical from space, on a low quality image.

You see where I'm going with this? The Face on Mars, or the D&M Pyramid, and all those other, huh, alien "structures"... which aren't that symetrical at all.
I've seen people draw lines on shots, claiming super arranged structures, complex patterns and goals... please.
I'll stop here. It's a waste of time, it just looks like simple eroded mountains and nothing else. One may see art in chaos, but shouldn't push the limits too far. Before becoming pathetic.