Amazing! Silicates on Mars!
Fig. 1 Sedimentary Mt. Sharp within Gale Crater
A recent post discussed zircon crystals in Earth soils and rocks, noting they are Zircon silicate. Someone at NASA must have read the post because they immediately reported “Rocks Rich in Silica Present Puzzles for Mars Rover Team”. NASA’s Curiosity rover has found much higher concentrations of silica at some sites it has investigated in the past seven months on Mount Sharp, a series of sedimentary layers within Gale Crater (Fig. 1). Silica makes up nine-tenths of the composition of some of the rocks. “Adding to the puzzle, some silica at one rock Curiosity drilled, called “Buckskin,” is in a mineral named tridymite, rare on Earth and never seen before on Mars. The usual origin of tridymite on Earth involves high temperatures in igneous or metamorphic rocks, but the finely layered sedimentary rocks examined by Curiosity have been interpreted as lakebed deposits.”
Cyclic Catastrophism
Fig. 2. Evenly layered sedimentary rock comprise the lake deposits known as Mt. Sharp.
During the period 3687 – 687 BC, each time Mars repeatedly orbited close to the Earth, (a day of Brahma) hundreds of volcanoes in the northern hemisphere of the Red Planet blasted some of the vital materials which when totaled, terraformed the Earth: rock, soil, water, seeds etc. These blasts produced the tridymite. In the first stage of each encounter, the water in Mars’ northern hemisphere was tidally drawn toward its north pole which remained facing the Earth (outflow channels). The tidal attraction of the Earth was particularly efficient in drawing water from the equatorial regions like Gale Crater, which exhibits flow features exclusively toward the north. Once each 14.4-year encounter ended, Mars entered an orbit around the Sun (a night of Brahma) and the water that remained became equally distributed by rain and natural flow. Therefore places like Mt. Sharp accumulated water mixed with some of the volcanic material that had not been blasted into space, and in those 15.6 year intervals a new layer of material was accumulated in Gale Crater. Mt Sharp was obviously a volcano which was activated at the earlier date when close passes of proto-Venus created the Tharsis Bulge, but did not erupt during the Mars encounters with the Earth because it did not face the Earth.
Each of the one hundred encounters and escapes of Mars with the Earth took 30 years. As a result, the sedimentary layers comprising Mt. Sharp are of equal thickness. The same material that was being blasted to the Earth was also being deposited in this formation. Therefore it is not surprising that silicates are found on the surface of the Earth and in Mt. Sharp. The failure of planetary scientists to understand this has resulted in the zirconium silicates (zircons) U-Pb ages being interpreted as Earth ages. The recent creation of proto-Venus makes clear that each planet has a unique age. Mars rocks, i.e. meteorites still falling and lunar rocks, which were also blasted from Mars when close to the Earth, show dates as high as 4.6 billion years, but native Earth rocks are limited to 3.9 billion years. Therefore the zircon ages are only indications of the ages of Mars rocks blasted to the Earth. This has resulted in the greatly exaggerated age of the K-T extinction at 66 million years, whereas the actual age is 6,000 years, as marked by the iridium spike deposited around the world by the close passes of proto-Venus just prior to the Mars encounters discussed above.