NASA NTRS2011
Mars, in its putative "warmer, wetter: early history, could have had a CO2 atmosphere much denser than its current value of <10 mbar. The question of where all this early CO2 has gone has long been debated. Now, several instruments on Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Spirit, including its Moessbauer spectrometer MIMOS II, have identified Mg-Fe carbonate in rock outcrops at Comanche Spur in the Columbia Hills of Gusev Crater. With this finding, carbonate cements in volcanic breccia collected on Sverrefjell Volcano on Spitzbergen Island in the Svalbard Archipelago (Norway) during the AMASE project are mineralogical and possible process analogues of the newly discovered martian carbonate. We report further analyses of Mossbauer spectra from Comanche Spur and discuss their relationship to Mossbauer data acquired on Sverrefjell carbonates. The spectra were velocity calibrated with MERView and fit using MERFit. Instead of the "average temperature" Comanche spectrum (data from all temperature windows summed), we refit the Comanche data for QS within each temperature window, modeling as doublets for Fe2+(carbonate), Fe2+(olivine), and Fe3+(npOx). The temperature dependences of QS for the Comanche carbonate and for a low-Ca carbonate from Chocolate Pots in Yellowstone National Park (YNP) are shown; they are the same within error. For Comanche carbonate summed over 210-270 K, (CS, QS) = (1.23, 1.95) mm/s. The value of QS for Sverrefjell carbonate at 295 K, (CS, QS) = (1.25, 1.87) mm/s, is also plotted, and the plot shows that the QS for the Sverrefjell carbonate agrees within error with the Comanche data extrapolated to 295 K. This agreement is additional evidence that the Sverrefjell carbonates are Mossbauer analogues for the Comanche carbonates, and that both carbonates might have precipitated from solutions that became carbonate rich by passing through buried carbonate deposits.