Scales on the rocks of Mars

Curiosity is exploring the topic of the strange flake rocks of the Antofagasta crater, it is a raw photo from April 27, today it had published more from this same area, they are taking samples because they are very interesting rocks, the crater itself is small, it is about 10 m in diameter, but it has two characteristics that make it very special.

The first is that it is a relatively recent crater in geological terms. It is less than 50 million years old, which means that the material that was brought out upon impact has only been exposed to the destructive action of wind, dust and cosmic rays for a short time. And that means that it can store chemical compounds and organic molecules that have been lost in other places on the Martian soil, other places that the Rover has passed through, so the researchers consider this to be a real treasure because these flake rocks and this is the second characteristic, the crater is that it is full, there is a lot, there are hundreds of square meters of it, of these rocks with scale or honeycomb structures.

It is practically certain that they are formed by the action of water, what I am not very clear about is how the action of water could have created such an amount, in principle the process would be a layer of mud, water, it could be a small pond or a small lake. That mud dries or freezes because ice, the cold can also make this type of structures, cracks are created in the dry mud, those cracks are filled with another material, it may be hit by the wind, with dust material that arrives from the wind and that hard material that fills the cracks is what draws the scales and then layer after layer after layer, because here there are a lot of layers with these structures of scales.

The interesting thing is that there was a theory that said that water was not necessary, but practically all the other theories that I have read, all of them imply the presence of water, so I already said, first there was a lot of water here, second, it should be a shallow place of water with the presence of mud. This is interesting, because on Earth of the two great positions on how life arose on Earth, there are defenders of the ocean floor and there are defenders of the primordial pool, that is, of small ponds with shallow water where mud, other elements, etc., were mixed in that primordial soup and the majority of researchers are betting on the primal pool.

And on Mars we have a primordial pond, a place with little water that dried out from time to time creating those cracks and that had mud and had substances and life could have arisen there.

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