Annual Meeting

Comparing Antarctic geology to the search for water on Mars

The McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica host geologic features that form nowhere else on Earth but are strikingly similar to features observed on Mars.  For this reason, scientists have been exploring this terrain for decades to understand the limits of life on Earth and the potential for life elsewhere in the solar system.  While it is the most stable landscape in the world, hosting buried ice millions of years old, the Dry Valleys do experience small amounts of surface erosion due to liquid water over long periods of time.  Our group has been documenting these processes for many years using high-resolution time-lapse photography and incorporating these data into long-term climate data to understand how water behaves in polar landscapes generally inhospitable to liquid water.  This presentation will show dozens of these time-lapse movies to show how barren landscapes evolve over time, and discuss what this means for the potential of liquid water on present-day Mars.

Jay Dickson is a planetary scientist who has studied the evolution and fate of water ice on Mars and in Antarctica for more than a decade. Jay received his B.A. from Hampshire College in 2002 and his M.S. in Geographic Information Science from the University of Southern California in 2014. Jay is a member of the research staff in the Planetary Geology department at Brown University.