Friday Headlines: 8-30-13

Friday Headlines, August 30, 2013

THE LATEST IN THE GEOSCIENCES

 

Today’s round-up:

Disaster in Louisiana: A sinkhole is videotaped sucking up part of a forest.

Did life begin on Mars, and come to Earth via meteorite?

 

‘The biggest ongoing disaster in the United states you haven’t heard of’

Seriously, just check out this video:

This is a sinkhole in Louisiana that recently formed. It opened in August of 2012 and at first, it was only about one acre. Now it covers more than 24 acres and is still growing.

Its formation is blamed on salt mining. What happens is that the mining company injects freshwater into a deep salt deposit, dissolving the salt and pumping it out for purification and use. In this case, the cavern left behind after the mining was complete seems to have collapsed. Now people are being evacuated and the hole is getting bigger.

Let the finger-pointing begin.

 

Life on Earth Started on Mars, Say Scientists

I hate headlines like this. I’m immediately skeptical of such a claim, and the ‘says scientists’ part makes me think that the scientists mentioned are in the minority from some evangelical institution and that this is just a hype story.

Then I pause and realize that this particular topic is of no interest to evangelical ‘scientists,’ so I give it a read.

I’ve heard this before – that life started on Mars and was carried here by meteorites. It doesn’t bother me, or affect my research in any way. My research begins with life well-established on Earth, whether it originated here or not.

Anyway, what evidence is there that life began on Mars?

One line of evidence comes from the presence of a particular form of the element molybdenum, which was present on Mars at about the time that life would have started, but would not have been present on Earth, because Earth lacked sufficient oxygen on the surface at that time. Mars, however, did have abundant oxygen on the surface.

This particular form of Molybdenum is thought to have been important in helping the reactions that lead to the origin of living things.

This is interesting, but there is the counterpoint.

Maybe Mars Seeded Earth’s Life, Maybe It Didn’t

The entire argument from above rests on the argument that molybdenum was important in the origins of life. It also assumes that the origin of RNA is what defines the beginning of life.

In fact, it makes a lot of assumptions. But that’s not a bad thing. It lays out all the assumptions for us, so we know what they are. We can decide if they’re good assumptions. We can now devise tests and experiments to determine if they’re good assumptions. It’s a starting point for science to continue.

Scientists haven’t proven that life originated on Mars. They haven’t really proved that it originated on Earth either, but that would be the simplest explanation. What scientists have done is provided a workable hypothesis, based on the current state of knowledge about the origin of life in general, that shows that life could have originated on Mars.

Now we’ve got more science to do.