Seasonally Dependent Formation of Sulfates in the Basque Lakes, British Columbia, as Analogous to “Cold and Wet” and “Warm and Wet” Mars
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Saline lakes are expected to have been extensively present on ancient Mars, particularly as the planet dried or cooled. Such lakes likely deposited sulfate salts, as these salts have been widely identified from orbital and in situ Mars data. However, the relationship between martian sulfates and the environmental conditions that formed them (including whether conditions were warm, cool, drying, or freezing), remains under‐characterized. To evaluate the relationship between sulfates and climate, we investigated the hypersaline, sulfate‐bearing Basque Lakes in British Columbia, Canada, which serve as an analog for both “cold and wet” and “warm and wet” early Mars. We use the rover and orbiter relevant instrument techniques of Raman, Near Infrared, and X‐Ray Fluorescence spectroscopy to evaluate seasonal lake mineralogy. We find that temperature‐dependent, multi‐cation salts form widely within the Basque Lakes' efflorescent crusts in the fall, which transform to meridianiite, mirabilite, a metastable Na‐sulfate 7‐hydrate, and epsomite in the wintertime. In both seasons, salt assemblages are metastable and persist beyond expected thermodynamic stability fields, suggesting ongoing climatic changes can prevent saline systems from settling into equilibrium phases. Coupled with sedimentological evidence, intimately mixed Mg‐sulfates of different hydration states could be an indicator of surface fluids that interacted with an atmosphere, while formation of Na‐sulfates could be evidence for brine freezing. Curiosity's exploration of the Gale crater sulfate‐bearing unit and Perseverance's exploration of Jezero crater on Mars offer excellent chances to investigate the influence of climate on Mg‐sulfate formation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".