A Geologist’s Journey from Earth to Mars

Thank you. Okay, so imagine standing on top of the rugged peaks of the Carpathian Mountains overlooking the breathtaking beauty of Eastern Europe. It’s the fall of 2018. I had just returned from an intense field season leading an international team of UT Austin and Slovak researchers and students studying the mysteries of this ancient mountain range. So the Carpathians extend about a thousand kilometers in Eastern Europe, and they’re interesting to us as geologists because instead of standing tall and straight this mountain range bends. And as geologists we’re interested in why that is. In addition, it’s associated with a large number of ore deposits and the metals contained within those ores are important for your electronics, for fueling the green energy revolution and a pushing forward technology. So as a field team, we only worked on a small portion of the Carpathians called the High Tatra Mountains, and these are located in Slovakia.
I’m from Slovakia, my parents emigrated here. This is my uncle and my cousins and my father hiked these mountains with his father and his brother. So it’s a lot of fun for me to follow in his footsteps. As a field geologist, I go hiking and collect rocks to understand their stories. The rock type that you see in the High Tatras is granite. We have granite here in Texas. The state of Texas capital building is granite. Enchanted rock is granite. You might have granite as part of your countertop. Well, it turns out granite has a large number of radioactive minerals in it, and we have the technology to date those minerals. And from that information, we know when the Carpathians appeared on the landscape, why is it bent and it’s relationship to the ore deposits. But in 2018, my life took an unexpected turn. A team of European scientists stumbled across my research and asked me if I would join their team.
And they were interested in building an instrument not to date minerals in the Carpathians, but to date minerals on another planet, and that planet was Mars. So who were these people? They were a consortium of three technology companies and three universities with interested faculty and students from Italy, Cyprus, and Spain. They came together to form a consortium, really at the intersection between technology, planetary science and geology. And what they wanted to do is to effectively build a mini time machine. That’s their prototype there. And this is their logo. It’s called In-Time. In-Situ dating for Mars and earth dating applications. And so effectively they want to build this to go there. And what do we know about Mars? Well, it’s from these images you get in social media, some rover expeditions. We have about 120 Martian meteorites that have come here from Earth and we know that they’re from Mars because we can heat them up and they emit gases that match that of the Martian atmosphere.
But you can imagine sending something from Earth to Mars 140 million miles away is a financial and logistical challenge. And we’re doing it. This is Mars sample return. It’s in the works and In-Time eventually would like to be part of the rover. So what is In-Time going to do? Well, it’s not going to time a crystallization age like what I was looking for in the High Tatras, but it’s actually going to time the last time rocks on Mars actually saw sunlight so it’s basically what we call a luminescence dating technique. So how old is Mars? Well, we think it’s the same age as the Earth. It is around 4.5 billion years old. Mars probably formed when the earth formed. But how do we get the age of Mars? Well, we count craters and the more heavily cratered a surface, it’s probably older than one that doesn’t have as many craters.
But the issue with Mars is that it’s a dynamic planet. It has volcanoes the size of some of our states. It has intense glaciers. It has huge rivers that would span the coasts of the United States. It has very strange sand dunes that scour the surface. And all of these processes work to erode those craters. And so the age we have for Mars is basically a plus or minus uncertainty of about a million years. So what is In-Time going to do? It’s going to time when those volcanoes erupted. It’s going to time when the rivers changed course, it’s going to time when those sand dunes were active. And all of this feeds into an understanding of Martian climate. And that’s important because if you ever think that there is life outside of earth, if there’s life on Mars, well you need to know something about climate.
We all know that climate and humanity and life are inextricably linked. And someday we’re going to go to Mars. And it’s important also for us to understand its hazards. So this luminescence dating technique is interesting. We use it to date actually pottery, this is a piece of pottery. They extract a piece of quartz from that. They use the luminescence dating technique and we know when that pottery was last exposed to sunlight. Well, who made that pottery? What were early humans like? Things like this. It opens that up. So the problem is on Mars, it doesn’t have any quartz. The luminescence dating technique is really set up for quartz. Instead, we have this rock type called basalt on Mars. You may see it in Hawaii. Mars is almost, it has quite a bit of this basalt rock and so what In-Time needs to do is to really expand the applications.
And it would be really helpful for us on Earth if it did so. There might be some quartz on Mars. Okay, there’s some that’s been detected in some craters, but it’s definitely not there planet wide. So you might also be wondering why? Why do we even have planetary scientists? Why would we ever want to go to Mars? And I’m going to tell you something, you might not know this, but within our lifetime, humans are going to go and live on Mars. And you might think that I’m crazy. You might be like, look, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but this is in the works. People with your adventure level up to level 10, people with money, international space agencies, universities, consortiums are doing this. At the University of Texas, I teach a class in the geology of national parks and the first expedition to Yellowstone, the area of Yellowstone, the 1869 Folsom Peterson Cook Expedition.
They were told, do not go to Yellowstone. It’s certain suicide. Well, let’s flash forward to 2023. Okay, Yellowstone had 4.5 million visitors. So it is innate in us as humans to have this drive for exploration. I’ll admit us as geologists, listen, we’ve scoured the planet, we work on all continents. We examine these rocks in incredible detail, but so do you. You go on your YouTube, you type in anywhere you want to go, you can be and visit that culture and visit that place. At some point we’re going to get bored of it. And that time is now. And people are, this is definitely in the works. People are going to, in our lifetimes, set up camp and leave and go to Mars. And really, as a scientist and a geologist, I’m inspired by that vision and I’m really humbled that I could be part of what I consider humanity’s next great adventure.