> I saw an amusing show where scientists experimented--played--with a certain species of scorpion by subjecting it to all manner of extremes. They concluded that it could easily survive on the current Mars, if there were food. Big "if," I think.
>

I hate it when "science channel" TV producers go looking for the most crackpot theorists (the ones who everyone agrees are way out in left field) and shoot a show based purely on exciting but fundamentally untestable ideas. This isn't about science; it's entertainment. Similar to cutting through all the hype surrounding the "exposé" of the Roswell Incident (the so-called alien spaceship) and the Philadelphia Experiment (the so-called invisible navy ship).

Putting a scorpion on Mars wouldn't mean much of anything at all, save that the scorpion is already suitably adapted to its own niche... on Earth.


> I'm not arguing with this evidence here, but it is worth mentioning that the above is a circular argument.
>

Okay. It's true that my field involves studying metal crystals, not minerals, but I do occasionally have to grapple with precessional oscillation and things like "rotational pulsed magnetic fields in opposition to ferrite lattices, which induces an orthorotation of this flux." Trying to explain this in nontechnical terms without math or diagrams (like I did before) can give me a headache. So it's possible that what I said before is unclear and circular. But you'll have to tell me HOW it's a circular argument, because I can't see it for myself.


> Also, there are other manners of creating dipole alignments which should be considered. For example, in magma which is exposed and hardens sporadically and quickly, the first band aligns to the earth's magnetic field and the subsequent, later flows align opposite the most recent one, in a natural opposites-attract way.
>

Oceanic basalt is not paramagnetic with itself. Unlike familiar iron ores like hematite, it's not paramagnetic, period. So no, a later lava flow cannot align with the previous flow in the way you describe. Any polar magnetic alignment detected is due to the influence of the earth's field itself.


> There may be others: contrary to high-school-textbook belief, the matter is not entirely confirmed.
>

Erm. It's not "entirely" confirmed because we haven't been doing "direct" observations over a "sufficient" timeframe (we might estimate that 200 million years' worth of active notetaking and 8 million human generations' worth of time should be about right for "entirely confirmed" observation, right?)

If we throw out all inferred observation without offering a reasonable explanation that equally fits most of the available facts, just how much and what kind of confirmation should we be satisfied with?

Aside: if you could find time to take some advanced geological courses in radiometrics, it would make things a lot easier to discuss :-)


> > The example of lake drainage ...
>
> Hm. I was thinking of the Lake Missoula Flood, and, searching around, the 1996 jökulhlaup in Skeidarárjökull, Iceland. [Woah. Nifty names.]
>

More detail, please? What exactly was unique about the magnetic polarity of Lake Missoula breaking through a huge glacial debris dam in Washington, and the jökulhlaup 1996 outburst flood in Iceland? Seems like they were just floods, which tend to cause more disorder, not increase in order...