QUESTION; Where is the Glass ?

this question keeps bothering me as I scan thru the images. we have all called out footings, corners of buildings, columns & partial structures. where did all the glass & piping go? does glass decompose over a long time period? I don't think so or I have never read about this. there should be mounds & shards everywhere around these sites. were these beings building just primitive structures with no windows Fred Flintstone style? also we should be seeing many vehicles still partially intact laying around. even they could survive a nuclear blast if parked behind a large enough rock or hillside. please give me your thoughts & comments to help tie all this together.

Manufactured glass can last a million years before degrading apparently - well that would be the case on Earth. The history of glass manufacture on Earth goes back to Mesopotamia but how much glass did they or the Egyptians or the Romans produce? If Earth history ended in the Roman era and an exploratory rover landed on Earth how much glass would we expect it to find 1,600 year later? If civilisation on Mars was limited to a bronze age type of culture and its final end was hundreds of thousands if not millions of years ago then there seems little reason to expect to see any remaining glass. Under those circumstance we should not expect to see much more than debris and rubble - and not much of that. And the chances of finding glass not covered in sand and dust close to zero.

I once thought that if one of the rovers came across a stone henge like structure that would be it - civilisation on Mars would be proved. Well I believed that would be the case until I found out the famous Stongehenge in England was rebuilt in the 1950s. Prior to that the stones were just scattered around and partly buried. In that state they would not look very impressive and would be indistinguishable from the kind of debris the rovers have imaged on Mars.

I've seen a couple of films that claim that if everyone on Earth disappeared it would take 10,000 years for every building to become rubble and after 100 million years even the last of the plastics would have eventually degraded away. That sounds plausible. The difference is this kind of projection is based on an expectation of weathering and plant growth to continue and present rates. However if there were plants then plant growth came to and end on Mars and weathering would likely be slower once the atmosphere thinned out. If we are looking at the remains of a Martian civilisation - given the thin atmosphere, lack of precipitation and no plant growth then decomposition on Mars would likely be slower than we might expect to see on Earth. A dead Martian civilisation evidenced by junkyard debris fields could easily be hundreds of millions years old. I know Will favours the idea Mars suffered a sudden catastrophe to explain the junkyard debris fields. But the other answer is a slow death and a long time scale. A long time scale would also explain the kind of rubble we are seeing.

GOOD JOB! I guess it is just hard for anyone to think in terms of millions-of-years. this must mean that when we see an anomaly that appears to be metal, then that said object would have to appeared at a much later date. aluminum melts at a fairly low temperature and steel a little higher. we all know that steel breaks down in a short time period so where does that leave us? if the glass is gone then for sure "All" metal objects would be long gone.