Thursday, September 5, 2024.
Carbon (18.5%) is the second most plentiful ingredient within the human bodybehind oxygen (65%) and adopted by hydrogen (9.5%).
Earlier than speaking about Mars, one thing about our planet Earth, by means of 4 phrases that seem within the implausible documentary “Carbon: The Unauthorised Biography”.
By the best way, because the first two posts this week have been about geology…
… we start with a quote from geologist Bob Hazen:
(1) “Each of us lives in a carbon world. We have to learn to live with carbon. And it is very happy to get along with us if we treat it well.”
But additionally the phrases, respectively, of a historian, a local weather scientist and an ecologist:
(2) “We have developed this relationship with carbon that has benefited us humans in many, many powerful ways… We now feel like we are managing a planet, but what we are beginning to learn is that we have much less control over things than we thought. And power itself is dangerous,” David Christian.
(3) “Carbon has gone from being a benevolent force, a protector of the Earth system in a stable state, to being released and increasing in the atmosphere. It is becoming a destroyer,” Will Steffen stated.
(4) “The carbon cycle shows that we are all irrevocably linked… we are all in this together,” Suzanne Simard.
So what did NASA discover intriguing about carbon on Mars?
Researchers of the rover Curiosity discovered that just about half of their samples (Gale Crater) had surprisingly giant quantities of carbon-12 in comparison with what scientists have measured within the Martian environment and meteorites.
What occurs is that dwelling creatures on Earth use the smaller, lighter carbon-12 atom to metabolize meals or for photosynthesis. Versus the heavier carbon-13 atom.
“On Earth, the processes that would produce the carbon signal we are detecting on Mars are biological,” the scientists say.
“We have to understand whether the same explanation works for Mars, or whether there are other explanations.” Mars could have began out with a special mixture of carbon isotopes than Earth 4.5 billion years in the past. Mars is smaller, colder, has weaker gravity and completely different gases in its environment. Moreover, the carbon on Mars could also be circulating with none life concerned.
“There’s a huge part of the carbon cycle on Earth that involves life, and because of life, there’s a part of the carbon cycle on Earth that we can’t understand, because everywhere we look there’s life,” stated Andrew Steele, a scientist on the Carnegie Institution for Science em Washington, DC.
Click on the picture beneath to be taught extra at NASA’s Mars Mission Portal. You may discover different intriguing subjects about methane… and oxygen.
