Dark streaks which flow down the slopes of Mars and fan out just like water but which NASA states are just dust streaks intrigued me enough to make a full fledged study of this geologic anomaly which spanned many months and thousands of MOC images and has led me (and others) to the conclusion that these may well be the action of water stains and not just dusty avalanches. The impact of this discovery is that water may well be much more available on Mars than previously postulated by the scientists at NASA and JPL. Though there are many instances on Mars where there are dark streaks that are obviously dust related (like the dark curlicues exposed by dust devils), the streaks I have been investigating fall well outside this ground phenomenon.

The stains we have been studying, for one thing, fall below 30 degrees latitude north and above 30 degrees latitude south, in other words, with the equatorial zones. None of these stains (or seepages) fall above 40 degrees north or south of the equator. There is dust all over Mars, so why aren’t these stain features outside of this range? These seepages also have uncanny water like morphology, i.e., they start at a point source uphill, than fan out and “flow” over and around obstacles and finally end in dendritic patterns. The stains also appear to turn a lighter gray over time, which would not be consistent with the dust avalanche theory. What is even more startling as proof is that none of the seepages show any lateral wind streaking which would be apparent if they were dust slides.

Human Exploration