I hope you’ll excuse this but I can’t resist after a tough pulse of climate news and academic work.

After reading Ken Chang’s story in The Times and seeing NASA’s news release on the intriguing methane releases measured on Mars, and seeing the image below of the tiny hole drilled in the surface (at left), I couldn’t help posting the following musing on Facebook:

Photo

Can’t wait for the methane catastrophe conspiracists to start equating the Martian hole with the Siberian one. No need to check scale or the like.

For the details on these very different holes, and methane findings, click here for NASA’s fascinating report and Chang’s article, and here for background and a video interview describing what was, and wasn’t, significant about the holes in the Siberian tundra.

And here’s a nice NASA video describing the instrument package that tests the drilled material extracted from a bit of Martian mudstone: