The Distributary Fans of Mars

The first two photos are enlarged from the white-traced rectangles in the third picture. They reveal unusual patterns traced in the sediment by what may have been tremendous amounts of flowing water. The bottom two photos look much like distributary fans we find at the mouth of the Nile, the Atchafalaya Basin in Louisiana, and other river deltas and alluvial fans photographed from the air around the world. Those of us who believe in but a mere few thousand years since God created everything, will find the pictures consonant with the effects of flowing water over a relatively short period of time. The mechanics of such erosion have been seen at Mt. St. Helens, The Washington State scablands, the Grand Canyon, and innumerable other sites where water has carved through sediment and solid rock.

It takes little imagination to see riverbeds and lakebeds in the pictures. Indeed, though, one does not see such evidence of fluid movement all over Mars. Only in a select few of the many pictures taken of the Martian landscape. The perennial question remains. Where did all that water come from and where did it go? Could it have been spewed out from a neighboring planet? Could there be great reservoirs of subterranian water on this fourth planet from the sun?