From: Ray Stanford <dinotracker.nul>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 15:50:55 -0500
Fwd Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 16:57:22 -0500
Subject: NASA-JPL May Have Cooked Their Own Goose!


NASA-JPL has diagnosed the 'blueberries' as concretions formed
within a wet substrate. Aside from a few of the spheres and at
least one textbook splash-form dumb bell-shaped small object that
seem to be composed of translucent glass possibly knocked up and
frozen in flight by cosmic impact, my examination of many images
of the 'blueberries' taken under diverse light angles suggests
that they are right as to the origin of at least most of the
'blueberries'.

Well, if NASA-JPL really intend to hide evidences of past or
present life on Mars, as some on this List feel is the case,
they have probably cooked their own we've-found-no-evidence-of-
life-on-Mars goose in making that diagnosis!

How so?

The geologists employed by NASA-JPL must not be very well-
informed on research during recent years concerning the function
of bacteria in a vast array of diagenetic (rock forming)
processes and, including the nucleation and growth of
concretions. Yet, in my research into diagenesis in
paleoichnites (ancient traces such as animal tracks and their
fossilized droppings, coprolites) it has been necessary to get
into current research on that, in order to better understand the
things my colleagues and I in paleoichnology find in streambeds
and in broader areas of anciently tracked-upon substrates.

To make a long story short (I shall over-simplify for sake of
brevity), there is increasing evidence of the function of
bacteria in rock-forming and even in some sand-forming processes
(wherein bacteria serve to nucleate the growth of small silicate
crystals). On Earth, in formation of spherical concretions,
bacterial colonies and/or other organic matter infused with
bacteria nucleate crystalline silica growth. I suspect it would
likewise be the case where Mars was wet over extended periods.

In the wet, mushy or 'muddy' environment, the resulting micro-
concretion slowly grows (sometimes incorporating or
encapsulating adjacent grains of silt or sand, sometimes simply
by crystalline growth from colloidally suspended silica
crystallizing and pushing adjacent silt ahead of its growth,
sometimes by a combination of the two processes), increasing its
diameter spherically across time. If conditions for the
bacterial colony's growth are episodic, one can sometimes see
(upon slicing the concretion) rather distinct concentric layers
of growth that formed the concretion, but where conditions for
growth are constant, the concretion may show a crystalline
pattern with virtually no concentric layering.

Nowhere known to me on earth are spherical concretions found in
anywhere nearly the concentration we have been shown within the
layered substrate in that Martian crater or in adjacent areas
where the concretions seem to have weathered (or have been
knocked) ex situ. Wherever I have found concretions in Early
Cretaceous substrates (Barremian-Aptian) they have formed where
the 'muck' that was turned to rock (likely with the help of
bacteria) was (when wet, in dinosaur times) full of organic
material and bacteria, both ferrophagic (iron eating) and other.

Thus it is that I seriously doubt we would see the vast numbers
of concretions in the crater on Mars if bacterial life had not
once been abundant in the wet, concretion forming substrate. As
recent years gone by, it has become more and more understood how
terrestrial rock formation and rock breakdown, as well, are
involved with bacterial processes of diverse types.

When will the seemingly old-fashioned geologists at NASA-JPL
wake up to recent advances in petrogenesis, etc., and realize
that they have likely been showing us concretionary evidence of
(at least) a former abundance of some kind of bacterial life in
a (at least) once water-abundant environment of Mars?

When? Well, I'm not holding my breath. Those people are
probably blind and petrified with paranoia of what colleagues on
the outside might say if they should be even slightly wrong.
Such was not the way of the great scientific pioneers, and
never will be.

Is that a goose I smell cooking, somewhere? Hmmm... could that
be blowing in from Pasadena?


Ray Stanford

"You know my method. It is founded upon the observance of
trifles." -- Sherlock Holmes in The Boscombe Valley Mystery