When space probes first began taking closeup images of Mars in the early 1970s, the pictures revealed what appeared to be a long dead world. Ancient waterways were visible on the surface, but they had been dry for billions of years. Crater-topped volcanoes dotted the planet — some of them a mile or more higher than Everest — but they had stopped erupting eons ago.

It all made a melancholy sort of sense: with only a tenth the mass of Earth, Mars has too little gravity to have held onto an atmosphere for very long, so any surface water would have escaped into space along with it. Its small size also let Mars’ inner heat drain away relatively quickly, just as a newly baked bagel cools faster than a loaf of bread. Without that heat to drive volcanism, the planet would surely have gone seismically still.

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But what seems obvious isn’t necessarily true. Over the past few years, satellites that now orbit the Red Planet continuously, and with far better instruments than those early probes, have picked up hints that Mars isn’t quite dead after all. Cameras have found lava flows, for example, that date to only 2 million years in the past — last week in geological time — while sensors have detected whiffs of methane, a short-lived gas puffed out in volcanic eruptions.

And now a team of British scientists have added one more link to the growing chain of evidence for a still active Mars. Using ultra-high-resolution images from the HiRISE, or High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, they’ve found the telltale signs of a recent Marsquake in a region known as Cerberus Fossae, near the towering Elysium Mons volcano. The smoking gun, argues team leader Gerald Roberts, of the University of London: rolling boulders.

The fact that we’re even talking about something as small as boulders shows how far the technology has come. “These images are so good,” says Roberts, whose analysis will appear Thursday in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Planets, “that we can see objects just a couple of meters [about 6 ft.] across for the first time.”

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From the start, Cerberus Fossae had promise. Thanks to earlier images, Roberts and his team knew that the area has hardly any craters, indicating that it is a very young lava flow. They also knew that a fault cuts across the lava, so there was reason to believe a quake had indeed taken place not all that long ago. In science, however, “reason to believe” is not reason to be certain, so Roberts and his colleagues hit on the boulder idea as a way to confirm their suspicions.

“On Earth,” he says, “when an earthquake strikes, it often makes loose boulders roll, and the closer to the epicenter they are, the more they move.” Armed with high-resolution images, Roberts and his team looked to see if the same had happened on Mars. They scrutinized something like a thousand boulders, he says, and sure enough, the evidence suggested that hundreds of them had moved.

“The boulders left tracks in the dust showing that they’d rolled or even bounced down slopes,” says Roberts. Admittedly, the rolling could have been caused by something other than a Marsquake — if boulders were frozen in place by a bit of subsurface ice, for example, which loosened when the heat from the noonday sun crept even a tiny bit above its typical peak of about 32°F (0°C). But if that happened, the pattern would have been random. Instead, the number of rolling rocks and the distance they traveled was highest right next to the fault and diminished the farther away the team looked. “The ice-melting hypothesis,” Roberts says simply, “is not supported.”

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So Mars hasn’t quite expired completely — but there’s no reason to believe any of the planet’s volcanoes are ever going to erupt again. At most, this fault, as well as a number of others that radiate from the Elysium Mons, suggests that the volcano may simply be experiencing a few death rattles.

Still, that means there’s still a bit of underground heat, and that in turn, observes Roberts, implies that there could be some water — not ice — lurking not far below the surface. Since water is considered a basic requirement for life, the notion that Mars could have some sort of bacterial inhabitants, perhaps left over from the time when water flowed freely on the surface, becomes more plausible.

As it happens, the original discovery of methane on Mars back in 2009 was interpreted by some as being direct evidence of Martian life: volcanic activity is one way the gas enters the atmosphere here on Earth, but bacteria churn methane as well. The new study by Roberts and crew suggests that the methane could end up being related to life after all — just in a more roundabout way.

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Article source: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0%2C8599%2C2107363%2C00.html

Late last year, Peter Gleick — the president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security; and a respected expert on water-and-climate issues — co-authored a paper on the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) task force on scientific ethics and integrity. Gleick and his co-author Randy Townsend of the AGU wrote that advancing scientific work to create a sustainable future would only be possible if scientists had the trust of the public and policymakers. And that trust, they added, “is earned by maintaining the highest standards of scientific integrity in all that we do.”

Strong words, and true ones too, but Gleick himself has failed to live up to them — and his actions have hurt not just his own professional reputation but the cause of climate science as well. Last week an anonymous person who called himself a “Heartland Insider” e-mailed six documents to 15 media and bloggers that purported to be internal memos from the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank that advocates highly skeptical views of climate science. The documents — which were quickly posted on sites like DeSmogBlog — contained detailed information about Heartland’s internal finances, including the names of major corporate donors like Microsoft and General Motors. The documents also outlined Heartland’s strategies, including efforts to promote school curricula that would cast doubt on the established scientific finding that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are dangerously warming the planet.

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For advocates of climate action, the Heartland documents offered a rare glimpse into the world of the conservative power players who work to cast doubt on climate science and delay action on global warming — the same people authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway called the “Merchants of Doubt” in their 2010 book by the same name. For its part, the Heartland Institute claimed that the documents hadn’t been leaked from inside the group but had instead been obtained by an outsider who had posed as a board member. The organization also said that at least one of the six documents — a short memo claiming to be a summary of Heartland’s work on global warming — was a fake, and threatened legal action against the bloggers posting the documents.

“It doesn’t matter what you believe about climate change, or if you’re a liberal or a conservative,” Heartland president Joseph Bast wrote in an e-mailed press statement on Feb. 20. “You ought to understand and denounce this unethical behavior.”

As it turns out, Bast may have a point. On the evening of Feb. 20, Gleick revealed that he had sent the alleged Heartland memos to the climate reporters and analysts, and that he had used deception in order to obtain some of them. Writing in the Huffington Post, Gleick said that at the beginning of 2012 he had received an anonymous document in the ordinary mail that appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate-program strategy. He said he did not know the source of the document, so he tried to confirm the accuracy of the information. In an effort to do so, Gleick said he “solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone’s name.” He said those new documents confirmed the information in the original memo, and that he made no changes to any of the documents before sending them out anonymously. “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate,” Gleick wrote. “Nevertheless, I deeply regret my own actions in this case.”

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As his apology concedes, what Gleick did was wrong. No reputable investigative reporter — certainly not one who worked at TIME — would be employed for long after obtaining insider information by lying the way Gleick did. Think of the outcry over James O’Keefe’s use of sting tactics to record employees from the now defunct political group ACORN as they gave advice to a supposed pimp and prostitute (actually O’Keefe and an associate). Credibility is nonnegotiable in journalism — it’s the only way we can believe what we read or watch — and if a reporter lies in the pursuit of facts, the resulting story will be much harder to believe, even if it really is true. Gleick isn’t a journalist — though as a regular blogger on the Huffington Post, he may qualify in a new media sense — but he was still creating a story. You can’t drink from a poisoned well.

Many climate advocates, while acknowledging that Gleick made a mistake, are calling him a heroic whistle-blower. “For his courage, his honor and for performing a selfless act of public service, [Gleick] deserves our gratitude and applause,” wrote Richard Littlemore of DeSmogBlog. But the prize for which Gleick broke the rules and damaged his own credibility hardly seems worth it. The alleged memos seem to confirm that the Heartland Institute is trying to push its highly skeptical view of climate science in the public sphere, which is only surprising if you’ve paid exactly zero attention to the climate debate over the past decade.

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If anything, the Heartland memos — which are now hard to judge because we can’t be sure exactly what’s real — indicate that fossil-fuel companies don’t seem to be spending that much money on climate denial, at least with this group. Exxon stopped donating in 2006 — it had given $675,000 before that — while the archconservative Koch Foundation gave just $25,000 in 2011, all of it earmarked for health care research. Most of the money seems to come from individuals, including one person referred to as “the Anonymous Donor” in the memos who gave $14.26 million to Heartland over the past six years. While that’s strange — there must be better uses of $14.26 million — it doesn’t exactly seem like a vast right-wing conspiracy, even if one person parted with a lot of cash.

The Heartland Institute seems to be mulling its legal options for now, though in the court of karma it may simply be getting its just due. Back in 2009, when a still unknown hacker stole and posted thousands of private e-mails from climate scientists in the controversy that became known as Climategate, Heartland didn’t seem too worried about the provenance of the documents. “This is new and real evidence that [climate scientists] should examine and then comment on publicly,” Heartland president Bast wrote after the e-mails surfaced in 2009. That the “new and real evidence” had been hacked didn’t bother Heartland any more than the fact that many of the Heartland memos were obtained deceitfully has much bothered many climate activists even after Gleick’s admission.

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It’s easy to wonder why they should care. Climate scientists have come under attack repeatedly in recent years from skeptics who seem indifferent to the facts themselves. You can’t find a Republican presidential candidate who accepts the scientific consensus on climate change; Rich Santorum earlier this month called climate science “an absolute travesty of scientific research.” The journal Nature was speaking for many in the climate community when its editors wrote in 2010 that climate scientists must realize they are in a “street fight.” And we all know that in a street fight, anything goes.

But that’s not how it works in science — and that’s what the entire climate movement is supposed to be based on. Scientific integrity isn’t about having the right goals. It’s about using the right methods, which is why research is policed so rigorously, and why even the hint of cheating can ruin a career. Scientists aren’t perfect, and there is enormous temptation to bend the rules and massage results — which happens more often than the scientific community would like to admit. But science works because the importance of those rules is drilled into students from the moment they first step into a lab. It’s why the public still trusts scientists far more than any other public figures. It’s how we know what’s real and what’s not.

That’s not how politics works, to say the least — which is one reason climate advocates have always faced such an uphill battle. It’s not a fair fight, but we have to believe that over time, the truth will win out. And we won’t get there by taking shortcuts.

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Article source: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0%2C8599%2C2107364%2C00.html