Division for Planetary Sciences meeting: Martian methane: rocky birth, then gone with the wind?

Our plain-English summary of Division for Planetary Sciences meeting: Martian methane: rocky birth, then gone with the wind?, by G. Schilling (Science, 2005).

The study

• Author: G. Schilling
• Journal: Science
• Published: 2005;309(5743):1984-5
• Type of article: News
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This item is not an asbestos study. It is a news report in Science by an astronomy writer. It describes talks given at the 37th meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences, held in Cambridge, U.K., from 4 to 9 September 2005. It reports no research on people, workers, animals, products or asbestos fibers, and the word asbestos does not appear. Its main story is about methane gas detected in the atmosphere of Mars. According to the report, planetary scientist Sushil Atreya said at the meeting that it was too soon to name martian microbes as the source. Atreya suggested instead a geochemical process called low-temperature serpentinization. In this process, basalt rock reacts with liquid water to produce minerals known as serpentines and releases hydrogen. The hydrogen then reacts with carbon dioxide to make methane. The article mentions serpentine minerals only as part of this process on Mars and says nothing about human health. The rest of the pages cover Saturn's rings, Saturn's moon Titan and other solar system findings.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: news report on presentations at a scientific (planetary science) meeting; not a research study
• Who was studied: No people or animals were studied. The report covers talks at a planetary science meeting in Cambridge, U.K., 4 to 9 September 2005.
• Main results:
  • As reported, Atreya said it was too soon to name martian microbes as the source of methane on Mars.
  • As reported, Atreya described basalt reacting with liquid water to produce serpentine minerals and release hydrogen.
  • As reported, that hydrogen then reacts with carbon dioxide to make methane.

Topics

The National Library of Medicine indexes this study under subjects our site covers: Chrysotile.

Related studies

• The Lost City Hydrothermal Field: A Spectroscopic and Astrobiological Analogue for Nili Fossae, Mars — E.S. Amador, J.L. Bandfield, et al. (2017)
• Noachian and more recent phyllosilicates in impact craters on Mars — A.G. Fairén, V. Chevrier, et al. (2010)
• Effects of asbestos and man-made vitreous fibers on cell division in cultured human mesothelial cells in comparison to rodent cells — K. Pelin, P. Kivipensas, et al. (1995)
• NIOSH's Respiratory Health Division: 50 years of science and service — K.J. Cummings, D.O. Johns, et al. (2019)
• Serpentinite and the dawn of life — N.H. Sleep, D.K. Bird, et al. (2011)
• Solubility of chrysotile asbestos and basalt fibers in relation to their fibrogenic and carcinogenic action — F.M. Kogan, O.V. Nikitina (1994)

Browse more research in Science, or return to medical research.