Another Terraforming Failure on Arsia Mons
This is the debut installment of a column we call Deep Ochre, featuring Martian viewpoint from points on Mars with great views, written by the Martian Spectrum’s roving columnist and Editor-in-Chief.
Read more about the mission of the Mars Spectrum here.
Anxiety is reaching an all time high in the Tharsis/Oondiri region after drone surveillance captured 3D video of another landslide on the slopes of Arsia Mons. Thousands of tons of rock and ice tumbled into one of the new lakes at its base Thursday, sending huge waves in all directions across its surface, threatening to overtop the moraine and drown old terraforming outposts and the small villages below that are still occupied by some of Mars’ original pioneers and their children, the forgotten “outpost kids” of the first Martian generation.
One of those pioneers is Diego Miera, who helps maintain a Dominion propellant plant at the base of the Arsia glacier and wears a white suit and helmet that looks tie-dyed with dusty crimson streaks that shift as we talk on a moraine looking down on the edge of the glacier, adjacent a meltwater lake and the plant below. Miera tells me it’s just another challenge added to a long list he and his family have overcome to remain here.
“This planet is primarily interested in trying to kill humans and it’ll surprise you with all the countless ways it tries to do that, but the people that been out here all this time, we’re even better at surviving.”
Miera is also quick to add that he’s literally losing sleep over the increasing threat from landslides and the outburst floods they can cause.
“Used to be we controlled all the phase changes up here – what’s frozen, what’s liquid. We’d thaw what we need when we needed it. You know Mars’d sure prefer to keep it all as stiff as the Martian Mule you used to get at the outpost bar over here. But now the new generation’s tired of bubble life and we’re just the collateral damage from the rush to try and turn this whole world into another Arizona.”
He says he spent much of Thursday night and Friday morning manning the newly installed pumps at the propellant plant after a surge of waves from the latest slide swamped the facility’s lower level, taking it offline for multiple shifts. He says Dominion crews are en route from the Nikola zone to assess any potential damage.
I can already hear many readers and listeners lighting up Musk, the Dominion and the privileged peoples of Mars for going Godzilla on the poor populations of the outposts, the prospectors in the caves and lava tubes and wanderers in between. Just another example of three-piece suits under the dome doing violence to the pressure suits living out in the red; bubble Mars stomping on the real Mars through a pattern of neglect that is rarely even acknowledged on a conscious level.
And you’d be right to look at the situation this way.
As Mars aims for its first ten million residents, the calls for a more hospitable climate have grown to a deafening roar, and Musk and Dominion have provided over and over again. Yet as past fatal outburst floods on Olympus Mons and Arsia Mons have proven, a more Mediterranean Mars comes at a cost to those that have been here the longest.
Comedians of our Grandparents’ generation joked with Musk about the prospects of nuking Mars. But they missed the punchline. The absurdity lies not in the imagining of a mushroom cloud on a far-off dead planet, but in the bitter irony that the plan would not only work, but work so well that it would create the same inequities and unequally distributed calamities here that we were escaping on Earth.
But as on Earth, the situation here is more complicated than it appears, especially if you rely on the simplistic narratives many of my colleagues produce for this news feed.
A Culture of Doubt and Mistrust
The complications can be seen on the widely circulated independent drone footage itself. But you have to be patient enough to watch more than just the 60-second spectacle of the slide and the raging waves. You have to rewind to the moments before all of that, to the moments when the footage goes out of focus as it makes a quick evasive maneuver, a move it had to make to avoid being hit by a large rock hurled in its direction from the top of the moraine: a rock tossed in its direction by an angry crowd of the outposters. Yes, the same outposters that are protected by the early warnings of potential glacial instability provided by nearly identical drones.
Of course, many people of the outpost community at Arsia Mons West say they have good reason to attack and destroy the drones, just as they did to the ground monitoring station setup atop the moraine by the confederation of Outpost councils for the same purpose five years ago. They say the drones are part of the problem, not the solution.
“Every time there’s a slide, there’s always a drone there to catch it,” Tunch Woodley, a local alderman and one of the original outpost residents, told me. “We all know the Dominion loves to use directed energy blasts for small terraforming gigs. Used to run a blaster for them myself back before the bubble went up. So is that drone just lucky to be there to catch an accident, or is it documenting what it’s there to cause?”
To be clear, public satellite and ground sensor records show no evidence of directed blasts in the area, and numerous engineers have debunked the claim that a surveillance drone like the ones in use at Arsia Mons could lift the sizable device that would be needed.
I’m also quite sure the drone that caught the most recent slide wasn’t what caused for one very simple reason. It was my drone. I was flying it at the time of Sol that forecasters predicted the glacier to be under maximum stress and therefore most unstable. I neglected to reveal this information to Mr. Woodley for fear I may get the same treatment as my drone.
Nonetheless, the theory persists, thanks in large part to a sense of distrust in the Dominion among outposters.
“It’s easy to understand where they’re coming from,” Miera tells me when I ask about anti-Dominion sentiment and conspiracy theories. “Dominion pays my bills, but this job is definitely getting harder, so yea, I get the frustration.”
The Dominion’s larger temperature augmentation initiative presents a direct threat to its own legacy facilities like the propellant plant on Arsia Mons. Woodley was one of several people to theorize to me that The Dominion “wouldn’t mind” or “would be perfectly fine” with a landslide or other accident destroying its older, far-flung infrastructure and collecting a significant insurance payout.
“It’s ludicrous,” Dominion spokesperson Argenta Romaine told me via secure messaging. “I can’t even tell you for sure that we have a policy that would cover such an event. More importantly, we have always and will continue to be committed to advancing the interests of everyone on Mars. Temperature augmentation is about raising the standard of living at the outposts as much if not more than anyone else on this planet, and we have always pledged to undertake this program in the safest way possible.”
Meanwhile, while locals like Woodley say they don’t always trust the Dominion to have their best interests in mind at all times, he’s confident in the knowledge and experience of outposters like himself to remain safe, even as the glacier shrinks, the lake grows and the threat from slides and floods intensifies.
“I terraformed much of this landscape myself. Literally shaped some of what you see with a blaster myself. Out here we know how to protect ourselves and what we’ve built. Maybe it’s gonna take a little work, but that’s what we know out here. So no, I’m not too worried.”
Woodley is so confident that he’s been working with the Outpost councils confederation to promote Arsia Mons as a top tourist destination. You can even book him for a hiking tour of the upper glacier. But I recommend you leave your camera drone at home.