05/20/2009

True Polar Wander and Climate on Late Hesperian/Amazonian Mars



Edwin Kite, UC Berkeley



True Polar Wander (TPW) can be a major driver of tectonics and climate change on one-plate planets, such as post-Noachian Mars. But did TPW actually occur? I will summarize work at Berkeley testing this hypothesis, and its place in understanding the last three billion years of climate change on Mars. I will also present results from an ongoing Berkeley/Ames collaboration using General Climate Models to further test late-stage polar wander. This talk may not turn your view of Mars upside down, but it could rotate it by about 8 degrees.

SLIDES

1. David Morrison: Mission to a Potentially Threatening Asteroid
2. Laura T. Iraci: Laboratory Studies of Water Ice Cloud formation under Martian Conditions
3. Jeffrey Van Cleve: The Race to Detect the First Earth-sized Planet
4. Ron Greeley: Surface modifications by winds on Earth, Mars, Venus, and Titan
5. JoAnne Hewett: The Hunt for Hidden Dimensions
6. Franck Marchis: Multiple Asteroid Systems: New Techniques to Study New Worlds
7. Interstellar and Early Solar System Organics in Samples from Comet Wild 2
8. Ross A. Beyer: Google Earth, now with Mars!
9. Jeffrey Scargle: Tools for Probing the Universe
10. Richard Muller: Discovery of Strong Cycles in Fossil Diversity
11. Rachel Mastrapa: Weathering on Icy Satellites: Probing the Near Surface Using Infrared Spectroscopy
12. John McCarthy: Convergent evolution of our own and extra-terrestrial intelligence
13. Jasper Halekas: The Dynamic Lunar Environment
14. Tom Abel: First Things in the Universe
15. Julie Chittenden: Experimental determination of the effect of salts, regolith, and wind
16. Philip Russell: Aerosol particle roles in climate change
17. Edwin Kite: True Polar Wander and Climate on Late Hesperian/Amazonian Mars
18. Robert Landis: NEOs Ho!! The Asteroid Option
19. Terry Fong: Field Testing of Utility Robots for Lunar Surface Operations
20. Mikhail Kreslavsky: Geological record of recent climate change on Mars
21. Amos Nur: Apocolypse: Earthquakes, Archeology and the the Wrath of God
22. Robert Lillis: Death of the Martian Dynamo
23. Brian Jeffs: Progress in phased array feed development for radio astronomy
24. Ray Kurzweil: The Implications of the Law of Accelerating Returns for the Search for ETI
25. The impact and recovery of asteroid 2008 TC3
26. Dr. Beth Ann Hockey: How to Speak to Your Computer
27. Janice Bishop: The Surface of Mars
28. John Balboni: How do You Qualify Heat Shields on Earth?
29. Kevin Zahnle: Earth After the Moon-forming Impact
30. Dave Brain: Atmospheric Escape and Aurora on Mars
31. Michael Carr: Mars - The Water Story and Prospects for Life
32. Risa Wechsler: Connecting Galaxies, Halos, and Star Formation Rates Across Cosmic Time
33. Natalie Batalha: Kepler's First Peek
34. Darlene Lim: Pavilion Lake - Diving Deep to Get Us to the Moon and Mars
35. Paul Kalas: HST Imaging of Fomalhaut
36. Reid Parsons: Where is Mars' Ice?
37. Markus Aschwanden: Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections Observed with STEREO
38. Nathan Bramall: Detecting Organics Using Fluorescence Spectroscopy
39. Dr. Stefan Funk: Fermi-LAT Observing the Universe With High-Energy Gamma-Ray Eyes
40. Special Panel: LCROSS Mission - The First Results of the Impact
41. Elmar Fuchs: The Inner Structure of a Floating Water Bridge
42. Ben Zuckerman: The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe - Some Great Challenges for SETI
43. David Hollenbach: Water, Molecular Oxygen and Ice in Star-Forming Molecular Clouds
44. Linda Spilker: The Rings of Saturn as seen by Cassini CIRS
45. Claudio Maccone: Deep Space Flight and Communications
46. Lauren Wye: Titan's Ontario Lacus
47. Steven S. Vogt: Finding Planets Around Nearby Stars
48. Gerry Harp: Exploring Alternative SETI Search Algorithms with the ATA

The colloquiums are free and open to the public, and run from noon to 1 pm on Wednesdays at the SETI Institute, 515 N. Whisman Road, Mountain View, California.