Monday, March 10, 2008

You should be reading Systemic

Systemic is a blog by Greg Laughlin at UC Santa Cruz about exoplanetary systems--the explosive new field with nearly 300 planets detected to date. The latest post is about the terrestrial analog of the island of Hawaii as Mars.

The landscape here resembles nothing so much as a habitable, terraformed Mars. Hardened ropes of lava run down to the water’s edge:

In the pre-dawn light this morning, the air was totally silent, and it was easy to imagine that I was actually on Mars, before the water was gone, when a Northern hemispheric ocean lapped up against the lava of the lowermost slopes of Elysium Mons:

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