Excerpt from MAGNIFICENT MARS

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Mars. Magnificent Mars is your ticket, a journey in words and stunning pictures that explore the red planet from pole to pole. With them you climb atop mighty volcanoes that dwarf Mount Everest, snake down giant canyons that could stretch from Ohio to California, dig through thick ice that caps the planet's poles, even poke through craters that puncture the moons of Mars.

This neighbor world may hold the key to whether life abounds throughout the universe. On Earth life arose and flourished, but there's no guarantee it did so elsewhere. In its youth, however, Mars was wetter and probably warmer. If ancient Mars also gave rise to life, then many other worlds in the cosmos have surely done the same.

Furthermore, Mars offers the chance to study a planet's history in a way that Earth doesn't. Terrestrial oceans, rainfall, continental drift, and volcanic eruptions have largely erased the Earth's distant past, whereas much of the Martian surface preserves a record of the ancient era when life was struggling to arise on Earth--and possibly Mars.

Magnificent Mars centers around the four elements of Mars: EARTH, AIR, FIRE, and WATER.

EARTH explores Martian geology, from the planet's iron core to its rocky mantle and surface, unfolding new, rainbow-colored topographic maps that show the striking dichotomy between the planet's smooth northern plains and its cratered southern highlands. Spacecraft have landed on Mars and witnessed the surface close up, while meteorites from the planet allow scientists to analyze Martian rocks in the laboratory.

AIR describes the Martian atmosphere, thin and cold, which nevertheless whips up ferocious dust storms that envelop the globe. The air's present composition offers clues to its past, revealing that long ago the atmosphere was thicker, laden with greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapor that warmed the world below.

FIRE explores the red planet's volcanoes, the tallest mountains in the solar system. In their youth, the volcanoes not only flooded much of Mars with lava, but they also emitted the greenhouse gases that warmed the planet. On rare occasions, the volcanoes still erupt: spacecraft images reveal lava flows only a few million years old, and most of the Martian meteorites are young volcanic rocks. When the largest volcanic province arose, it cracked the planet's crust and created Valles Marineris, the largest canyons in the solar system.

WATER discusses the fourth and final element, thought to becrucial to life. All terrestrial life requires liquid water, and ancient Mars had rivers, likely lakes, and possibly even an ocean. Furthermore, enormous floods carved channels whose remains testify to the water's fury. Perhaps, billions of years ago, a pool of water, stirred by winds and warmed by nearby volcanoes, shuffled its chemicals in just the right way to give birth to the first living beings in the solar system; their fossils may still be preserved in the ruddy Martian soil, waiting for the first Mars-bound astronauts to discover.

From Ken Croswell's Magnificent Mars. Copyright by Ken Croswell. All rights reserved.

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