My Chilean Alma adventure continues this week on planetary radio. week back to the Atacama Desert in Chile, continuing my coverage of the Alma Observatory

inauguration.

But we've also got all our regulars beginning with Planetary Society, senior editor, Emily

Loch Duowala.

Emily, welcome back from LPSC, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

I look forward to seeing more of your blog entries.

I know you're preparing more for us, but there is one in particular for March 20th that I think is quite fascinating. I don't know how you're

going to be able to summarize this but I particularly want to call attention to

vugs, smectites, newberries, and 300-year-old lessons about stratigraphy.

That's right, you know, geology, it's a fun subject because, first of all, you have this long

three-century old heritage going back to Steno talking about

various laws by which you can interpret flat-lying strata and also they have all these wonderful terms

and I think that geologists spend a lot of their time hungry because there's an awful lot of food

metaphors.

But no, so that there was an awful lot of detail in these presentations at the Lunar and

Planetary Science Conference, but I was struck by these parallels between Curiosity over at Gail Crater on one side of Mars

and Opportunity over on the rim of Endeavor Crater on the opposite side of Mars.

And despite the fact that they're looking at rocks that are

in completely different locations, they're both occupied by the same activity

right now which is to interpret the geologic history of flat-lying strata of sediments that formed in a running water

environment that was a neutral pH that by all estimation would have been a really nice place

for little earth-like microbes to survive.

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