All communications with Arsia Mons were temporarily halted on Sol 10,380 when a ground station connecting the local mesh network with MarsLink was vandalized.
The hiccup was brief with traffic soon re-routed through another ground station, but the short outage did not go unnoticed. Several surveillance drones connected to the network on the west side of the central glacier were observed performing their auto-land sequence.
“Normally an issue like this would be automatically re-routed and resolved almost instantaneously,” Dominion spokesperson Argenta Romaine said in a statement. “But given the current situation, we have added limited security protocols to ensure that certain modifications to the network receive human approval.”
Romaine declined to elaborate further, but Dominion has made previous reference to increased security protocols in response to both attempted network breaches in recent months and vandalism of ground infrastructure at Arsia Mons that has been recurring intermittently for over five Martian years. Readers of this column will recall that attempted drone stonings have also become common in recent months.
Dominion says it is reviewing footage from the MarsView satellite network and will seek to make formal information requests of individuals “in a diligent and equitable manner.”
Ironically, this latest incident comes as work is underway to expand drone surveillance and glacial outburst flood warning (GLOF) systems at Olympus Mons. The expansion there is being undertaken with the full support of local Outpost councils, and no organized opposition or resistance.
While fatal GLOFs have occurred more recently on Arsia Mons, Olympus Mons remains the site of the most deadly such event to occur since first arrival, when an entire outpost was virtually wiped out as it was nearing completion.
As Martian volcanoes go, Arsia Mons is overshadowed by the unthinkable size of its neighbor, Olympus Mons – the largest volcano in the solar system. An old outlander working the Tharsis route in the earliest days of peopling liked to say an eruption of Olympus Mons would be like if the entire nation of France were a swollen bloody pimple that God decided to pop one day. The oldest Outlanders had a way with illustrations that were at once geographically accurate, nauseating and offensive to at least one nationality.
And the image of l’Hexagone erupting in a massive mess of blood and pus does at least present a comparable scale, as the resilient nation has roughly the same diameter as Olympus Mons. But literally building upward on this comparison, such a zit would be an absolutely grotesque growth since Olympus Mons is over twice the altitude of Mount Everest.
Let’s take the disgusting comparison even further: imagine one half of Mars as a human face, and Olympus Mons would occupy nearly 18 percent of it. So our volcanic pimple would take up nearly one fifth of this poor hypothetical person’s planetary profile and it would be swollen to a height that overshadows the nose.
Arsia Mons is not nearly as massive as Olympus Mons. And yet, awesome Arsia is still about as wide as the state of Utah. Picture a single volcano covering everything in between Nevada and Colorado from east to west, from the Great Salt Lake to Lake Powell north to south. And of course, the whole thing rises to an elevation of over 60,000 feet, twice as high as Everest.
This gorgeous rusty mound is where humanity installed the industrial heart of its new venture on Mars.
Natural and anthropic forces combine to create Arsia Mons’ trademark elongated cloud.
It seemed to make sense at the time. Arsia is less intimidating than Olympus, which soars 16 miles high, and ice can be found at a variety of elevations. The lava tubes below Arsia also proved more accessible and suitable to habitation in the early years.
But when accidents or miscalculations happen, all that ice can become a deluge and the tubes perfect channels for a devastating flash flood.
No escape
Back on Earth, one of the earliest signs the climate tide was turning for the worse was the rash of glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) in the Himalayas and the Andes and even in the Alps and Rockies. As the high glaciers melted, what were once small lakes and trickling tributaries at their toes bloated into swollen reservoirs and relentless torrents. The insult added to this injury was the destabilization of the glacier itself that drastically increased calving, ice and rockfall events. Huge chunks of mass falling into oversized lakes below triggered surprisingly voluminous tsunamis that would rip down high canyons, scraping away much of the life that had established itself in the valleys below. Vegetation, livestock, villages, dams and just about anything else could be washed away by a powerful outburst flood.
And such catastrophes all took place above ground, where all that water theoretically had some room to spread out. At Arsia Mons this hydrological violence ran its course through subterranean settlements were there was no such relief. The weak gravity of Mars is still plenty powerful enough to pull a million drips downward until they form into larger moulins emptying into one of millions of holes or fissures in the mountain’s Swiss cheese foundation. Eventually it finds its way into volcanic air pockets, including some occupied voids.
The worst such event here came relatively early. Long before warming up the planet or terraforming was part of the discussion. It was a pretty simple engineering mistake… relying too heavily on old and outdated scans of the region, some really primitive MRO data that hadn’t yet been replaced by GeoMars scans. All the automation in two worlds and still plenty of room for human error.
Anyway, an early residential encampment was setup inside a lava tube below the glacier that had been cataloged as clear of all glacial toes and flagged as safe. The pioneers thought they were living below dry regolith, but actually the porous rock over their heads was thin. Above a slight layer of lava rock was a small, dark cavity below thousands of tons of ice, which must have frozen solid before that air pocket was created by some sort of collapse of the frail pumice… maybe from a weak marsquake of some sort.
Maybe you see where this is going already. Residential encampments put out a certain amount of waste heat and gas, which was enough to begin to melt and weaken that frozen shelf, leading it to collapse down into that void, through the thin layer of regolith and, well… thousand of tons of ice falling on your home with no warning – I think you get the picture.
There were no survivors among the engineers and their families who were subterranean at the time of the collapse. It was the first such tragedy of the peopling period and actually remains the event with the single highest death toll on Mars to date.
But the response to this historic failing — or rather the response to the response — leaves much to be desired. Today, with tensions building and commmunications breaking down in the Outlands, there is a strong sense among many, including this correspondent, that on Mars as on Earth, the disasters of the past are mere prologue for headlining events that could produce the worst sort of spectacle.
People ask me all the time why I don’t just move. God, I hate that question. First, to presume it would be so easy. It used to be an insult to suggest someone lives in a bubble, now it’s a status thing here to literally live in one. Truth is, though, it’s the same here as it was on Earth.
When my parents talked about people living in a bubble, they were saying those people were out of touch with the real world. Today it’s the same here, we’ve just dropped the metaphor and gone straight to the real thing. People here, they really are out of touch with this world.
This place, I mean the actual place, not the facsimile under the dome – this place is my home… and it wants to kill me and you and all the rest of us and everything else except maybe the tardigrades. Ditch the gear and the miniature bubbles we move around in and it’ll boil your blood in minutes.
All the more reason to move under the dome, right? But I say no. And you’d think the reason why would be obvious by now – the old yin and yang thing, whatever you want to call it. The deeper the misery you know, the deeper the joy on the other side of the equation. You know what I mean, right?
Look, what I’m saying is we aren’t meant to be comfortable. That’s all just marketing and consumption and manipulation. Hasn’t this been obvious for decades? At least I thought it was clear to anyone paying attention. Maybe I’m wrong about that.
Anyway, think about going back to a state of nature, right? Who was that? Hobbes, yeah? Nasty, brutish and short. For centuries on Earth, everyone’s trying to pillage and steal their way out of that fate for a long time. Eventually we get around to distributing it in a more civilized way and even the middle class gets to live a life of comfort. And really, by the beginning of the millennium even the poorest people in the richest countries on Earth were unimaginably comfortable by historical standards.
But then it starts to go the other way. All that comfort, it ain’t free. You gotta pay. You pay personally with obesity, heart disease, cancer, depression, addiction – it’s all in there. And the world pays – environmental destruction, inequity, the whole planet starts to boil and its inhabitants begin to go full Lord of the Flies. The first pandemic hits and we took a much bigger hit than we really needed to. I think a less comfortable society would have fared far better.
But that’s not the point I’m trying to make. It’s just a single example of what I’m trying to tell you. Our society… our species had to go through a massive correction because we settled down too quick, we got more comfortable more quickly than our own programming could handle. Stack overflow. Crash. We raced Darwin, outran our own evolution and sprinted off a cliff.
This world is the bottom of the pit below the precipice we flung ourselves off of. It’s a second chance, an opportunity to struggle again, because we are built for it. We are not meant to relax and contemplate ourselves for hours, unless it comes at the end of a day spent in which you knew actual, real suffering. At least for a moment.
So will I move under the bubble? You tell me? Seems like a step backwards. Now I know we’re turning all of Mars in to one big dome of sorts, but I don’t expect it to go so smoothly. People with knowledge of what this world is really like, just how ruthless it is -- nasty and brutish, really – you’re gonna need us, especially if you wanna stay comfortable. I mean, look, I understand the human need for comfort. I guess what I think nobody asks themselves is – who needs a comfortable person?
I didn’t answer the question really, but I think I sort of did.
- Saul Seneca has worked as a Dominion engineer and independent guide at Arsia Mons and throughout the Tharsis/Oondiri region.
Mars is the future of humanity. Mars is the present for bold pioneers like you, but the present state of Mars is soon to be a thing of the past.
Following years of taking temporary shelter in Starships, lava tubes and regolith dugouts, the first generation of Martians emerged into the light of sol, thanks to Dominion’s advances in nanotube and minimagnetosphere production.
Today bubble life really is the Utopia beyond Earth that futurists have foretold of going back well over a century to before the dawn of the Space Age. In a generation, we have moved on from a climate spinning out of control to one that we control for the benefit of all pioneers and their families.
But humans, especially pioneers like you, weren’t meant to spend all their days and nights in a bubble. The spirit of exploration is strong among Martians and the Red Planet is home to some of the most magnificent and accessible wonders in the solar system.
Soon, through remarkable advances in atmospheric attenuation technology, Mars will begin to feel even more like home, both inside and beyond the bubble.
Big changes are coming soon. The Red Planet as you know it is about to get a lot bigger, and maybe just a little bit less red. Consider it a homecoming without having to go back home.
Decades ago on this date (Earth date, that is) a robot landed on the edge of Jezero Crater, which is now home to one of the largest enclosed arrondissements on Mars.
Of course, much has happened in the years that followed, including plenty of controversy in the development of Jezero itself. It can be easy to forget the more innocent days when only a handful of overbuilt robots rolled around the red regolith.
The handful of samples that Perseverance collected but that never made it to Earth are now on display in the Jezero council offices, a symbol of a simpler, more idealistic time.
It would be good to get a little of that same spirit back today. Thanks, Perseverance for what you set out to accomplish, what you did achieve and for the pure intentions you brought with you to the Red Planet.
For everything else your discoveries set in motion, some people remain very thankful. Most of the rest, I’m sure, don’t hold grudges against robots. You’ll want to watch out for the few that aren’t shy about doing violence to a rover, though.
Stay safe, Perseverance, wherever it is they have you locked away for safe keeping.
- E.M., Founder and Editor-in-Chief Sol 10,246 (currently Jezero Central)
