And so it is that, when confronted by yet another member of the public citing the Fox News stat, climate scientist Robert Kaufmann set about finding ascientificexplanation.
In the name of scientific detachment, they cited a possible alternative explanation that the features were caused by the movement of dry dust down a slope.
Such statements are an affront to most Americans' intelligence which commonsensically applies a prosaic form of the scientific method: They look for the explanation that best fits the facts.
Newtonian physics is a simplification of our visible world that worked until advanced scientific techniques allowed scientists to conceive of quantum theory as an explanation of how our universe works.