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Hey, it's Cole Swindell. After I give everything I've got to land a perfect vocal, I usually take five before jumping into the next track.
And I've learned exactly how to recharge in that time.
Some folks grab coffee. I hit a quick good lookspin.
Next thing you know, the break is just as fun as land down the track.
A better break makes for a better take.
Need a break? Less chumbo.
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Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy.
Explore the wonders of the cosmos with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast.
Each episode offers a gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond.
Perfect for unwinding after a long day.
Let's travel through the mysteries of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful slumber under the night sky.
Mars. Let's be honest. When you close your eyes and picture it, what do you see?
You see the rust. Right, the rust.
You see that endless oxidized orange dust.
Just rocks that have been sitting there baking in radiation for three billion years.
It is the definitive desert planet.
It is. I mean, in our collective imagination and certainly in the images we get from the rovers,
it's a place of absolute desiccation. It really makes the Sahara look like a rainforest.
Exactly. And the story we've been told, the story that is basically in all the textbooks,
is that the water is gone. Or, well, if it's not gone, it's locked up in the attic in the basement.
At poles. Right. At the poles.
That's the prevailing narrative. We know there is water ice at the poles.
We can literally see the white caps. But for human exploration, for the dream of actually living there,
the poles are, well, the problematic.
Problematic is a very, very polite way of saying absolutely lethal, isn't it?
It really is.
But here is where it gets interesting for our deep dive today.
What if this story is wrong? Or not wrong exactly, but missing a massive chapter.
A huge chapter.
Right. What if there are gigantic reserves of water?
We're talking massive active glaciers hiding in plain sight right near the equator,
exactly where we want to land. And the only reason we haven't seen them is because they were
wearing a disguise.
It sounds like a conspiracy theory, doesn't it? But this is actually the central thesis of a fascinating
new piece of research we are unpacking today.
Yeah. So today, we are looking at a breakdown of a study published in the journal Icarus
by Eme de Pablo and a team of researchers. And the specific article that caught our eye was from
universe today, written by Andy Thomaswick titled,
Martian volcanoes could be hiding massive glaciers under a blanket of ash.
And this research essentially proposes that we might be sitting on the resource jackpot
of the solar system. But to find it, we have to stop looking at Mars like a dead rock and start
understanding how volcanoes and ice interact in really specific ways.
And to do that, we have to start of all places in Antarctica.
We do. We have to look at a very specific, very strange island on Earth to decode what is
happening on Mars.
So here is the mission for this deep dive. We are going to find out how a volcano and
Antarctica is basically the decoder ring for Martian geology.
We are going to look at the smoking guns that prove these glaciers exist.
We'll explain why our billion dollar radar satellites completely missed them.
And then we are going to talk about the catch, the legal catch.
The incredible irony that finding this water might make it illegal to actually touch.
So settle in, we are going really deep on this one.
Let's do it.
I want to start with the accessibility problem.
Because I feel like a lot of people listening might think you know water is water.
If we know there is ice at the Martian poles, why are we so obsessively hunting for it at the
equator? Why can't we just land at the North Pole, melt some ice and make a cup of tea?
It's a great question and it really comes down to the sheer brutality of the Martian environment.
You have to remember Mars is already incredibly cold.
The average global temperature is something like minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
But the poles, the poles are a completely different beast.
How cold are we actually talking?
During the polar winter, you are looking at temperatures dropping to minus 195 degrees Fahrenheit.
Wow.
Yeah. That is cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere.
That is actually why the caps grow and shrink.
It's dry ice freezing and sublimating.
Right. So if I am trying to run a habitat or a rover or just keep my blood liquid.
You are fighting a losing battle, materials become brittle, electronics fail, lubricants freeze
solid. And then there is the darkness. The polar regions on ours, just like here on Earth,
experience months of total darkness. If you are relying on solar power, which is our primary
energy source for these missions, you are dead in the water.
So operationally speaking, the poles are a nightmare.
An absolute nightmare. But there is another layer to this, which is the regulatory hurdle.
The space lawyers.
The planetary protection officers. Yes.
We have an international agreement that we cannot contaminate what are called special regions on Mars.
A special region is defined essentially as anywhere that Earth microbes might be able to survive
and replicate.
And since life needs water.
Exactly. The poles have accessible water ice.
If we crash a land or there, or if a human walks around there with a leaky space suit,
we could introduce Earth bacteria into a water rich environment.
That could completely destroy our ability to ever detect native Martian life.
We simply wouldn't know if the bugs we found were Martians or just hitchhikers from Florida.
So the poles are essentially the forbidden zone.
That's right. They are the most scientifically valuable spot.
So we aren't allowed to touch them without extreme billion dollar sterilization protocols
that just aren't feasible for large-scale human missions yet.
Which brings us to the Holy Grail.
We need water, but we need it where it's warm, where there is sunlight,
and where the planetary protection rules are a little more relaxed.
We need water at the equator.
Ideally, yes.
The mid-latitudes or the equator.
That is where you have the solar energy.
That is where the thermal management of your base is easier.
That is where you want to build.
The equator is dry.
It's a desert.
Well, that has been the assumption.
We look at the equator and we see dust.
We see rock.
But for decades, geologists have been looking at satellite images of these regions
specifically around the volcanoes and seeing things that look
well wrong.
Wrong how?
Like out of place.
Yeah, they see shapes, low bait shapes,
these long tongues of material that look like they flowed down a hill.
If you saw that exact shape on Earth, you would immediately say that is a glacier.
But on Mars, at the equator, exposed ice is impossible.
It would sublimate turn straight from a solid into a gas almost instantly in that thin atmosphere.
So the scientists are looking at these shapes and saying it looks like a glacier,
but physics says it absolutely cannot be a glacier.
Exactly.
And that cognitive dissonance is exactly what this new paper is trying to resolve.
They are basically saying it is a glacier.
It's just wearing a heavy coat.
And to prove that, they found a twin.
A geological twin right here on Earth.
Let's talk about deception Island.
Ah, Deception Island.
It is genuinely one of my favorite places on Earth,
geologically speaking.
Even the name Deception Island.
It sounds like a villains' layer from a spy movie.
It really does.
It's actually located in the South Shetland Islands,
just off the Antarctic Peninsula.
And it's named that because from the outside, from the ocean,
it looks like a solid, impregnable island.
But it's actually a donut.
It's a ring.
A cauldera.
Right.
It's the flooded cauldera of an active volcano.
You can actually sail a ship right through a narrow breach in the wall,
a spot called Neptune's Bellos,
an anchor inside the center of the volcano.
That sounds incredibly ominous.
Yeah.
Anchoring your ship inside an active volcano.
It is.
And it's not just technically active.
It is historically very recently active.
This thing erupted multiple times in the late 1960s and 1970s.
And those specific eruptions are the key to unlocking our Martian mystery.
Because deception Island isn't just made of rock.
It's rock and ice.
Exactly.
It's heavily glaciated.
So when those eruptions happen specifically,
the big ones in 1969 and 1970,
you had this violent, chaotic interaction between magma and ice.
Now, when I think of lava meeting ice,
I think of melting.
I think of massive steam clouds and catastrophic floods.
And that definitely does happen.
But here is the nuance we need to look at.
These were what we call free,
Hodo-magnetic eruptions.
Free to magmatic, okay?
That is a $5 word.
Break that down for us.
Sure.
It means the magma interacts directly with water,
usually groundwater or glacial melt.
And it basically explodes.
The steam expansion pulverizes the magma
into tiny microscopic fragments, ash, dust.
So instead of just flowing rivers of lava,
you get these massive towering plumes of black ash
raining down on everything for miles.
So it essentially rained black dust
onto these pristine white glaciers?
Yes, it blanketed them completely.
And here is where the physics gets incredibly cool.
You would instinctively think hot ash
falling on a glacier would melt the whole thing.
Sure, hot rock, cold ice, melting ensues.
But ash is very porous.
It is full of tiny air pockets.
It's actually an incredible insulator.
Think of it like a giant blanket of styrofoam.
If you put a thin layer of hot ash on ice,
sure, the top millimeter melts.
But once that ash cools down,
it forms a crust, a thermal barrier.
So it stops being a heat source
and immediately starts being a protective blanket?
Exactly.
It shields the ice from the sun.
It shields it from the wind.
It traps the cold in.
So on Deception Island today,
there are places where you can walk
on what looks for all the world like a dirt hill.
It's gray, it's rocky.
It looks like solid ground.
But if you were to dig down just a meter or so with a shovel,
you would hit solid, ancient glacial ice.
A dirty glacier.
Or a glacier in an Earth suit?
A debris covered glacier.
That is the technical term.
And this gives us a very clear model, a mechanism.
If it can happen so perfectly on Deception Island,
could it happen on Mars?
So the researchers took this.
Model volcano erupts, ash covers ice, ice survives,
and they looked at Mars.
And they found a match.
They did.
They turned their attention to a specific region
called Hickatee's Tholus.
Hickatee's Tholus, another great name.
Who is Hickatee?
The Greek goddess of magic crossroads and ghosts,
which is actually very fitting for a dead volcano.
Very fitting.
So what exactly is Hickie's Tholus?
It's an ancient shield volcano in the northern hemisphere
of Mars.
It's incredibly old.
We are talking billions of years.
But when the researchers looked at the flanks of this volcano,
the long slopes leading down from the peak,
they saw the exact same morphological features
they saw on Deception Island.
More fallogy, meaning the physical shape
and texture of the land.
Right.
They didn't just see generic rocks or impact craters.
They saw specific patterns that, on Earth,
only ever form when you have a massive body of ice
moving under a blanket of debris.
So the working hypothesis is this.
Hickie's Tholus erupted a long time ago.
It spewed massive amounts of ash.
That ash covered the glaciers that were sitting at its base.
And now millions or billions of years later,
those exact same glaciers are still sitting there,
perfectly preserved under a layer of rock and dust.
That is the theory.
But in planetary science, you can't just look at a picture
and say, well, it looks similar so it must be the same thing.
You need proof.
You need evidence that creates a signature
that only ice can create.
The smoking guns.
The smoking guns.
And this paper identifies three very distinct ones.
Let's walk through these because this is the real
detective work.
Smoking gun number one, crevasses.
Crevasses.
Now most people kind of know what a crevasses.
If you've seen a documentary about climbers on Everest,
it's the terrifying, seemingly bottomless crack in the ice.
Right.
The abyss you don't want to fall into.
Exactly.
But physically, why does a crevass actually form?
It forms because ice is a solid, but on a massive scale,
it flows like a very, very slow thick liquid.
It is plastic.
When that flowing ice goes over a bump
in the bedrock beneath it or has to turn a corner,
it stretches.
And because the top layer of the ice is brittle,
it snaps.
It cracks.
OK, so cracks mean movement.
Precisely.
If you just have a pile of dirt or static dirt,
it doesn't form systematic, deep parallel cracks.
It might slump a bit in a landslide,
but it doesn't fracture in these very specific, predictable
patterns.
And we see these exact cracks on Deception Island.
We do.
We see them incredibly clearly in the higher-resolution satellite
imagery of the ash-covered glaciers there.
And crucially, we see these exact same fracture patterns
on the slopes of Hickory Stolas.
So we are looking at a Martian surface that
is broken in a way that suggests the material underneath it
is stretching and flowing downhill.
Yes.
It implies that the core of that dirt pile
is actually something mobile, something
that behaves exactly like ice.
OK, that is compelling.
But rock can crack.
Earthquakes happen.
What makes it definite?
That brings us to smoking gun number two.
And this is a word I had honestly never
heard before reading this paper, the Bergschrund.
The Bergschrund.
It's a wonderful German word.
Berg, meaning mountain.
Shrund, meaning cleft or fissure.
It sounds like a heavy metal band.
We are the Bergschrund.
It really does.
But geologically speaking, it is a very
specific, very important feature.
A Bergschrund is a special type of crevasse
that forms at the very top of a glacier.
At the head.
Right.
Imagine a massive glacier sitting in a mountain valley.
The top edge of the ice is frozen solid
to the mountain rock face.
It's stuck there.
But the rest of the massive body of the glacier
is incredibly heavy.
And gravity is constantly pulling it down the valley.
So it pulls apart.
It tears away.
The moving ice physically rips away
from the stagnant ice or the rock face.
That tear creates a massive, deep, gaping crack
right at the very top of the system.
That is the Bergschrund.
It's the separation point.
It's basically the ice saying, I'm leaving now.
Exactly.
And here is the kicker for our Martian mystery.
You do not get a Bergschrund in the landslide.
You do not get it in a rock fall or a tectonic fault.
You only get it when you have a cohesive, highly viscous mass
that is slowly sliding downhill under its own immense weight.
And we found these specific formations on Mars.
We did.
The team identified surface features
at Hakedi's goal is that matched the geometry
of an Earth Bergschrund perfectly.
And we aren't talking about small little cracks here.
Some of these features are up to 600 meters long.
600 meters.
It's like six football fields.
That is huge.
It's massive to have a continuous sweeping fracture
that large implies an enormous body of material
moving in absolute unison.
It is a very strong indicator that we aren't just
looking at loose dirt sliding down a hill.
We are looking at a coherent sheet of ice
that is, or at least was, slowly sliding down the volcano.
That is wild.
So we have cracks showing flow, which are the crevasses
and cracks showing detachment, the Bergschrunds.
What is the third smoking gun?
The third one is found at the other end of the glacier.
The bottom, it's the bulldozer effect.
I like the sound of that.
What is the bulldozer effect?
Geologists formally call them pushmarines.
Imagine a massive bulldozer driving
through a field of loose soil and rocks.
As it pushes forward, a huge pile of debris
builds up right in front of the blade.
Right.
Now imagine the bulldozer just stops and backs up.
That big ridge stays there.
It marks the furthest point the bulldozer ever reached.
Exactly.
Glaciers are nature's bulldozers.
As they slide down the valley, they
push thousands of tons of rock and soil in front of them.
When the glacier eventually retreats or in this specific case,
when the ice simply stops moving and stabilizes,
it leaves behind these very specific bumpy,
ridged terrains at the terminus.
And I am guessing we see this at Deception Island.
We see it clearly.
The ash-covered glaciers push the debris
into these distinct lobes.
And we see almost identical, low-bate ridges surrounding
the base of the flows at Hecady Stullis.
So let's put the whole puzzle together here.
We have the massive detachment here at the top,
the flow cracks in the middle, and the rubble pile
pushed up at the bottom.
It is the complete anatomy of a glacier.
It is.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck,
and pushes rocks like a duck, it's probably a glacier.
But, and I have to play devil's advocate here,
because there is a huge claring difference between Antarctica
and Mars.
The atmosphere.
The atmosphere.
Mars is effectively a vacuum compared to Earth.
The atmosphere pressure is tiny.
If I took an ice cube right now and put it on the equator
of Mars, it wouldn't melt into a nice little puddle.
It would sublimate.
It would turn straight into gas and just vanish into the center.
Correct.
Exposed ice is fundamentally unstable
at those Martian latitudes.
So if these glaciers really are millions of years old,
why are they still there?
Why haven't they just evaporated away over the eons?
Even with a dirt blanket, surely the gas would eventually escape.
This is the survival mechanism question.
And the authors of the paper propose a really elegant two-stage
process to explain exactly how it survived.
Walk us through that.
OK, stage one.
The volcano erupts.
The glacier is covered in ash.
But as we discussed with the crevasses,
the glacier is still moving.
It cracks.
It forms these deep fissures.
Which opens the ice underneath directly to the Martian air.
Right.
And at that exact moment, simplemation does happen.
The pristine ice exposed deep in those cracks
instantly turns to gas and escapes.
But then stage two kicks in.
The patch kit.
Exactly.
Mars is an incredibly dusty place.
We have global dust storms.
We have more volcanic ash falling over time.
That ambient dust settles right into those open cracks.
It fills them up.
Like spackling a hole in drywall.
Perfect analogy.
The dust fills the crevasses and creates a dense plug.
And once that plug is formed, the system is sealed.
The dust gets compacted.
It becomes a physical barrier that water vapor just cannot
easily pass through.
So the ice is basically trapped inside its own patched up shell.
It's sealed in a geological time capsule.
The authors argue that what we see today,
these shallow, dusty troughs on the surface,
are actually just the ghosts of the original crevasses.
The ice deep below has retreated slightly.
The dust has slumped in to fill the void.
And now the whole system is an equilibrium.
The sublimation has stopped completely
because the seal is airtight or, well, Mars tight.
That is incredible.
So the very environment that usually destroys the ice,
the blowing dust and the dry conditions,
actually helps seal it in and protect it.
Nature always finds a way.
OK, so the geology makes sense.
The physics of the preservation makes sense.
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But there is one giant billion dollar technological elephant
in the room, and we really have to address it.
Sure.
Sherrod, the shallow radar instrument
on the Mars reconnaissance orbiter.
This is a machine built specifically
to find underground ice.
It sends radar waves down.
They bounce off the subsurface ice,
and we get a nice picture.
We have used it to map the poles.
We have used it to find buried ice all over the planet.
It is arguably our primary tool for exactly this kind of work.
So did it, beep.
When Sherrod flew directly over HECK80 as the list,
did it say, bing, giant glacier right here?
It did not.
It was completely silent.
Worse than silent, actually.
It gave us noise, clutter.
And for a long time, critics of the Glacier theory
have used that as definitive proof.
They say, look, if there was a mile thick glacier sitting
right there, the radar would absolutely see it.
It didn't see it, therefore, it's just a pile of rock.
That sounds pretty logical on the surface.
It sounds logical, but it completely
ignores the physical limitations of the technology itself.
The paper argues that Sherrod is the right tool,
but HECK80's thullis is the absolute wrong geometry for it.
Explain that.
Why does the physical shape of the volcano
matter to a radar beam?
OK, let's do a little bit of physics.
Sherrod works by sending a chirp, a radio pulse
straight down towards the planet.
We call that nader pointing.
The pulse hits the surface and part of it bounces back.
Part of it penetrates the ground, hits the denser layer
of ice below and bounces back.
And you measure the time difference between the two
bounces to figure out exactly how thick the ice is.
Exactly.
But this entire system relies on what we call specular reflection.
Think of it like a mirror.
If you stand directly over a mirror that
is laying perfectly flat on the floor
and you shine a flashlight straight down at it,
the beam bounces straight back up into your eyes.
You see the bright reflection.
OK, it makes sense.
Now, imagine that same mirror is on a steep slope.
Say it's tilted 20 degrees.
You are still standing directly above it.
You shine your flashlight straight down.
Where does the beam go?
It bounces off at an angle.
It hits the wall across the room.
It definitely doesn't come back to my eyes.
Exactly.
The receiver antenna on the satellite is your eyes.
Because hecatistolis is a volcano,
it inherently has steep sloping flanks.
The radar pulse hits that slope and scatters wildly away
from the spacecraft.
We just don't get a clean echo back.
So we aren't seeing no ice.
We are just seeing a deflected signal.
We are seeing blindness.
We are seeing clutter caused by the extreme roughness
and the sharp angle of the terrain.
The lack of a clear signal is not evidence of absence.
It's simply evidence of a bad viewing angle.
So the most sophisticated scanning tool we have
is essentially useless for this specific type
of geological formation.
Until we can physically tilt the radar
or get a completely different vantage point, yes,
we are flying blind.
Which brings us right back to the visual evidence.
We have to trust our eyes, the morphology,
because our ears, the radar just aren't working
in this context.
This feels like a classic scientific standoff.
The visual data screams, yes, it's a glacier.
And the radar says, I have no idea.
And in the complete absence of radar confirmation,
the deception island analog becomes
the absolute strongest argument we have.
We know for a fact this exact morphology
means buried ice on Earth.
It is by far the most logical explanation
for what we are seeing on Mars.
So let's assume for a minute they're right.
Let's assume Higati's tholus is indeed sitting
on a massive buried glacier.
And let's assume, as the article suggests,
that this might be true for other massive volcanoes
on Mars, Olympus Mons, Argea Mons, Screse Mons.
It would completely change the inventory of water on Mars.
We aren't just talking about a few hitting buckets of frost.
We are talking about hundreds of cubic kilometers
of pure fresh water sitting near the equator.
So what does this actually mean for us
for the future of human exploration on Mars?
Because this really feels like the big
so-what moment of the whole discussion.
It is a total game changer for what
NASA calls in situ resource utilization.
I, S, are you living off the land?
Right.
Instead of bringing all our water from Earth,
which costs roughly $10,000 a bottle just in launch weight,
we mine it right there.
So if this theory holds up, we don't
need to go to the deadly poles anymore.
We don't need to freeze to death in the dark.
We can land comfortably at the Sun-Equator
right next to a volcano, which might even still
have some deep residual geothermal heat.
And we could just drill.
We drill through a few meters of soft volcanic ash
and bam, we hit pure, ancient, massive ice.
And from that ice, we get water to drink.
We crack the hydrogen and oxygen
to make literal rocket fuel.
We make breathable air.
It becomes the ultimate gas station and oasis
for a future colony.
It sounds perfect.
It honestly sounds too perfect.
It usually is.
And this is where the other shoe drops, the legal shoe.
The outer space treaty.
Article 9x of the 1967 outer space treaty to be exact.
It is the foundational document of all space law.
And it has a very specific clause
about harmful contamination.
This goes right back to what we talked about the very beginning,
planetary protection protocols.
Right, we avoid the poles because they are special regions.
We don't want to accidentally introduce our dirty earth
microbes that might kill off native Martian life
or completely mess up our science experiment.
But right now, we feel OK about landing
rovers at the equator because we assume it's dry, dead rock,
no water, no potential for life, no problem.
Exactly.
But if we prove that there is massive, easily accessible water,
just a few meters under the surface
of these equatorial volcanoes.
Then the equator instantly becomes a special region.
Yes.
If hecka's the list has water, and if that water is accessible,
then technically, under the current coast par guidelines,
the committee on space research,
it becomes a highly restricted zone.
So the exact moment we definitively confirm the resource exists,
we might legally ban ourselves from ever using it.
That is the dilemma.
It is the ultimate catch 22, the ultimate irony of space exploration.
We are spending billions of dollars searching desperately
for the one thing we need to survive.
But because that thing water is also the absolute prerequisite
for life, finding it triggers the exact international protocols
designed to protect life.
We need the water to stay alive.
But if we touch the water, we might
be committing a massive crime against science.
Or a crime against potential alien biology.
It raises a genuinely massive ethical question.
Do we have the right to dig up and exploit these resources
to fuel our rockets?
If there is even a 1% chance that there
is dormant microbial life waiting inside that ice?
It's not just an engineering or science problem anymore.
It's a fundamental philosophy problem.
It is.
And it's one we are absolutely going to have to solve
before the first starship lands with humans on board.
So how do we resolve this standoff?
How do we find out if the ice is really there
without triggering a total legal lockdown
or accidentally contaminating the site?
Well, the article points out a harsh reality.
We can't do it from orbit anymore.
We have hit the absolute limit of what we can see
from 200 miles up with our current satellite.
Three unit boots on the ground.
Or robot treads.
We need a dedicated mission to hecket ease tholus,
not just to look at it from above,
but to actually touch it, to drill down.
There are some interesting proposals for this, right?
There are concepts being developed.
There is the idea of fly radar, which is essentially
a drone or an airplane that would fly directly
in the Martian atmosphere.
Oh, that solves the geometry problem.
Exactly.
If you were flying a drone just 1,000 feet off the ground,
you can fly alongside the volcano.
You can look directly at the slope, not just
down on top of it.
You can get that specular reflection.
You can definitively confirm the ice
without ever having to touch the ground.
But eventually, someone is going to want to actually drill.
Eventually, yes.
And that will be the moment of truth for humanity on Mars.
You know, when we started this discussion,
I really thought we were just talking about
some weirdly shaped rocks.
But this connects absolutely everything.
It connects the history of wailing in volcanoes in Antarctica
to the ancient volcanoes of Mars.
It connects the complex physics of radar scattering
to the international ethics of biological contamination.
That is the beauty of comparative planetology.
You pull on one weird little thread,
a donut shaped island in the South Shetland chain,
and it completely unravels a mystery on a planet
140 million miles away.
It really makes you look at Mars completely differently.
It does.
And I want to leave you our listeners with that exact thought.
We tend to think of Mars as a fossil, a dead thing,
just a static red marble spinning in the dark.
But if the Pablo and his team are right,
Mars is much more dynamic than we ever gave a credit for.
It is a world that is actively holding onto its past.
It is wrapping its precious water in heavy blankets of ash.
It is hiding its greatest treasures
in geological time capsules,
just waiting for someone clever enough and careful enough
to actually find them.
And it challenges us.
It demands that we be better explorers.
We can't just be tourists looking at the scenery
for morbid.
We have to be detectives, and more importantly,
we have to be stewards.
As we plan to become a species that lives on two worlds,
we have to grapple with a heavy fact
that the second world isn't just a blank canvas
for us to paint our bases on.
It has its own deep history, its own complex geology,
and maybe, just maybe, its own life.
And perhaps, thanks to a fiery little island
called Deception, we are one step closer
to finally understanding it.
That is a wrap for this deep dive.
I highly recommend you go search for Deception Island
and look at the photos.
It is hauntingly beautiful.
And then go look at the orbital images of Hakedi's Tholus.
Once you see the resemblance between the two,
you really cannot unsee it.
It's uncanny.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for being curious.
And as always, keep looking up.
Tala Redic here from 2311 Racing, another checkered flag
for the books.
Time to celebrate with Jamba.
Jump in at JambaCasino.com.
Let's Jamba.
No purchase necessary.
B-T-W-Cook.
Voidware prohibited by Ma.
CCNC.
21 Plus.
Sponsored by Tromba Casino.
B-T-W-Cook.
Voidware prohibited by Ma.
CCNC.
21 Plus.
Sponsored by Tromba Casino.
