Has NASA offered any theories yet? I haven't followed all of the info that has been released. I'm sticking with the oolitic limestone model for now. However, on earth doesn't the carbonate precipitate that accumulates on a grain of sand or shell fragment (see http://www.science.ubc.ca/~geol202/sed/sili/oolites.html) to form the oolite ultimatley come from sea organisms? If so, then there's always the possibility that such action took place on Mars to form these spherules. Since I don't have time to follow all of NASA's press conferences, etc., y'all just let me know if I'm up in the night... -----Original Message----- From: Joe Bauman [mailto:bau@desnews.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2004 11:08 AM To: Utah Astronomy Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] second thoughts Hi Chuck, The Moqui marbles do have some amazing similarities to the Mars thingies. What bothers me is that I collected some myself many years ago down around Coral Pink Sand Dunes. I'm not quite surrendering, but it looks grim for the blueberries as life argument. What got me is that the marbles seem to be connected to groundwater and iron. We all know about iron and Mars. What if the groundwater is percolating upward, connecting with iron and silica, and forming these things? They would tend to project out, like these seem to, and might even have "rootlets" that are tubes in the soil where the groundwater traveled. It seem reasonable. Best wishes, Joe _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.utahastronomy.com