RED PLANET HAS ALIEN ICE FORMS
Boffins find frost on giant Mars volcanoes
ONE of the world’s oldest penguins has had a chick — with her toyboy partner.
Great-great-great grandmother Windy (30) and Nacho (4) had the arrival at Newquay Zoo in England.
Windy — a 30-yearold Humboldt penguin — surprised everyone at the zoo when she paired up with young male last breeding season.
But the 26-year age gap doesn’t seem to have been an obstacle for Windy, as this year the couple has produced a healthy young chick.
While four-year-old Nacho is a firsttime father, Windy however, first became a mother in 1999 and has produced a whopping 23 chicks since then.
WATER in the form of frost has been detected on the highest volcanoes on Mars.
Researchers found that the red planet’s Tharsis volcanoes — the tallest in the solar system — have “on and off ” patches of water frost in what the international team described as a “significant” first.
They say their discovery, described in the journal Nature Geoscience, challenges previous assumptions about the Martian climate — and is a major breakthrough in the search for lifeforms on other planets.
Study leader Dr Adomas Valantinas, of Brown University, Rhode Island, said: “We thought it was improbable for frost to form around Mars’ equator, as the mix of sunshine and thin atmosphere keeps temperatures during the day relatively high at both the surface and mountaintop — unlike what we see on Earth, where you might expect to see frosty peaks.
“What we’re seeing may be a remnant of an ancient climate cycle on modern Mars, where you had precipitation and maybe even snowfall on these volcanoes in the past.”
The study suggests that the frost is present for only a few hours after sunrise before it evaporates in sunlight.
Dr Valantinas says the frost is also “incredibly” thin — likely just one-hundredth of a millimetre thick or about the width of a human hair.
Surface
But the researchers calculate the frost constitutes at least 150,000 tons of water that swaps between the surface and atmosphere each day during the cold seasons — the equivalent of around 60 Olympic-size swimming pools.
Tharsis, the region of Mars where the frost was found, hosts several volcanoes. They tower above the surrounding plains at heights ranging from one to two times that of Mount Everest while Olympus Mons is as wide as France. Dr Valantinas says the frost sits in the calderas of the volcanoes, which are massive hollows at their summits created during previous eruptions.
The team proposes that the way the air circulates above these mountains creates a “unique” microclimate that allows the thin patches of frost to form. They believe modelling how the frosts form could allow scientists to reveal more of Mars’ remaining secrets, including understanding where water exists and how it moves, as well as understanding the planet’s complex atmospheric dynamics, which is essential for the search for signs of life. Dr Valantinas added: “This notion of a second genesis, of life beyond Earth, has always fascinated me.”