This article in Russia Today discusses NASA’s recent conundrum with “inexplicable” changes in oxygen levels on Mars.
“During the warmer spring and summer months, the oxygen levels recorded by Curiosity rose by some 30 percent, receding back to normal levels each Autumn, though by different amounts each year, indicating that some unknown phenomenon is adding and subtracting oxygen from the atmosphere.”
Hmmmm, what could possibly create more oxygen in warm seasons?
I just can’t think of anything.
“At present, there is no known process that might explain these readings.
We’re struggling to explain this,” said planetary scientist Melissa Trainer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“The fact that the oxygen behaviour isn’t perfectly repeatable every season makes us think that it’s not an issue that has to do with atmospheric dynamics. It has to be some chemical source and sink that we can’t yet account for.”
Life on Mars?
At present, the only plausible theory relates to the planet’s methane levels, which also fluctuate, increasing by up to 60 percent during the summer months. However, we also do not fully understand the process that causes the methane fluctuations either, and correlation of rises in oxygen with increases in methane level does not necessarily indicate a causative relationship.
While both gases can be produced organically, they can also both be produced geologically, so it may not indicate life on Mars just yet. But maybe.
[Even a primitive algae, if is has moisture, could substantially increase Martian atmospheric oxygen levels far above the 0.16% average.]
“We have not yet been able to come up with one process that produces the amount of oxygen we need,” said astronomer Tim McConnochie of the University of Maryland.
“But we think it has to be something in the surface soil that changes seasonally because there aren’t enough available oxygen atoms in the atmosphere to create the behaviour we see.”
OK, NASA – too bad nothing could possibly explain that…
For what it’s worth, I’ve been doing a lot of research into the military’s use of Remote Viewing – and their psychics believe there was advanced life on Mars long ago and that there still is some life there today.
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