Talk:Martian soil

CO2 ice at the equator?

Hi all,

Article currently says there's thought to be CO2 ice at the equator. To my knowledge this isn't right. CO2 will be gas at equatorial P/T conditions.

This needs a citation, or if this sentence ("water and CO2 ices") is supposed to mean CO2 clathrates, it needs to say that. Is whoever wrote this still about? DanHobley (talk) 23:41, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

fwiw - not my text - my edits are usually cited - page history might help I would think - enjoy! :)Drbogdan (talk) 02:35, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Brief followup - according to the article page history, seems the uncited text, "It is believed that large quantities of water and carbon dioxide ices remain frozen within the regolith in the equatorial parts of Mars and on its surface at higher latitudes.", *may* have been added by Bryan Derksen (23:28, 13 April 2009) - hope this helps in some way - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 03:25, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

There are way to many images in this article

It looks like someone scrapped every image possible and regurgitated them on to the article. They need to be better organised at least. And please don't have images on both the left and right hand, it text formatting on mobile. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 14:40, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 27 June 2024

Martian soil → Martian regolith – "Martian regolith" is a more accurate term for this particular portion of the Martian surface and is essentially exclusively the one used in the scientific community and literature. The current title also creates some ambiguity with the regolith article not neatly pointing to the same concept by name. I've requested the same sort of move at Lunar soil. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 08:04, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

• Quick note that Warrenmck expanded upon their argument at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Astronomy#Requested moves for Lunar soil and Martian soil (see WP:CANVAS). ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 08:25, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

I could be a little biased here as a regolith specialist, but I've basically never encountered consistent use of "soil" here outside of either much older papers or some more general public conversations, where regolith is still more common (and this seems to be backed up by google trends), and both articles accidentally distinguish the Lunar and Martian surfaces from the main regolith article. I would have just done it but there was a recent rename discussion on Lunar soil after someone renamed it Lunar dirt, so I didn't want to just plow ahead.

Content from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Astronomy#Requested moves for Lunar soil and Martian soil, wasn't my intention to WP:CANVAS. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 08:31, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

27 June 2024 (UTC)

• Support, probably time to rename this per encyclopedic accuracy. "Soil" is made by living organisms, so using the term for Martian material is metaphorical and not scientific (as far as is currently known). Of course the redirect should remain. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:51, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
• Undecided, in terms of WP:COMMONNAME, I (suprisingly) found there are more scholarly ghits for "martian soil" (11,700) than "martian regolith" (7,830). I think both should be mentioned in the lead sentence. My guess would be there are more WP searches for the former, since regolith is an unfamilar technical term. Praemonitus (talk) 13:59, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

  I believe you're using Google Scholar, which indexes just about anything it can, so you get a lot of inexpert content thrown in there and shouldn't be used as a proxy for scholarly discussions. Soil is used in the literature, but the specific term for what the Lunar surface is made of is regolith, and we have a regolith article here. Soil is typically a distinct thing, in a planetary surface context it's the sub-centimetre component of regolith, so this falls against being technically inaccurate as well.

  I do believe we're going to be repeating these arguments in double thanks to Lunar regolith! Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 14:22, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

  (Repeated counter-argument.) Looking through a number of pages of scholarly ghits for "martian soil", I'm seeing a large number of scientific papers using "martian soil" in their title. Hence, I don't think that option can be arbitrarily tossed aside based on an Earthly definition of soil. Mars has also been more chemically active than the Moon, so it's an evolved medium, not just shattered rock. Praemonitus (talk) 15:19, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

  Agreed, of course if the name is moved then 'Martian soil' should be an alternate name in the lead. But soil is an actual descriptor for organic material, so, as mentioned above, accuracy seems a factor aside from common name. Randy Kryn (talk) 22:42, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

  I'll add a comment that Merriam-Webster includes this definition for soil (n): "the superficial unconsolidated and usually weathered part of the mantle of a planet and especially of the earth."[1] Praemonitus (talk) 13:44, 28 June 2024 (UTC)