Sulfates are salts that form when sulfur, usually in compound form, mixes with other minerals in water.
When the water evaporates, the minerals mix and dry out, leaving the sulfates behind.
These sulfate minerals can tell us a lot about Mars, such as its water history, and how it has weathered over time.
Pure sulfur, on the other hand, only forms under a very narrow set of conditions, which are not known to have occurred in the region of Mars where Curiosity made its discovery.
There are, to be fair, a lot of things we don’t know about the geological history of Mars, but the discovery of scads of pure sulfur just hanging about on the Martian surface suggests that there’s something pretty big that we’re not aware of.
The way this article is written is so annoying to me. It’s like this mixture of Buzzfeed sensationalism and Tumblr anthropomorphization.
Our cute little Mars explorer experienced some wanderlust and went on a little adventure, only to trip over an unassuming rock. What happened next will shock you! An amazing yellow substance poured out of the rock, surprising the rover and, more importantly, the world. This mysterious discovery could change everything!
When in reality, the rover ran over a rock that broke open to reveal sulfur. Which is cool, because scientists didn’t know that these rocks contained sulfur, and they don’t yet understand how they formed. But I wish the article could just say that, without all the nonsense.
It’s why I checked out of science news in general. It’s all so garbage and has been since the cable channels that used to be science based got bought by the reality tv companies.
It’s the style how all news in this era (the late you are not gonna believe this period) is written.
Don’t worry, it ends abruptly when the journalist are banned and AIs takes over fully with everyone using their mandatory personal AI to tl;dr the articles (this is during the early years of the enshitification maxima).
It gets intellectually much better after that when the stone-tablet tech gets back into regular use.
It was the Illuminati, obviously.
Crack open a cold rock with the Mars robots.
