Buried Mars Glaciers are Brimming With Water

Excerpt from news.discovery.com

Glaciers beneath the dusty sands of Mars contain enough water to

coat the planet with more than three feet of ice, a new study shows.

“We have calculated that the ice in the glaciers is equivalent

to over 150 billion cubic meters of ice — that much ice could cover the

entire surface of Mars with 1.1 meters (3.6 feet) of ice,” Nanna

Bjørnholt Karlsson, a post-doctoral researcher the Niels Bohr Institute

at the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement.



Radar images previously revealed thousands of buried glacier-like formations in the planet’s northern and southern hemispheres.

That data has now been incorporated into computer models of ice

flow to determine the glaciers’ size and hence how much water they

contain.

“We have looked at radar measurements spanning 10 years back in

time to see how thick the ice is and how it behaves. A glacier is,

after all, a big chunk of ice and it flows and gets a form that tells us

something about how soft it is. We then compared this with how glaciers

on Earth behave and from that we have been able to make models for the

ice flow,” she said.



The glaciers are located in belts around Mars between 30

degrees and 50 degrees latitude, roughly equivalent to just south of

Denmark’s location on Earth. The glaciers are found on both the northern

and southern hemispheres.

The finding could be an important clue to what happened to

Mars’ water. The planet, which is now a cold, dry desert, once had

oceans, lakes and habitats suitable for microbial life, results from

past and ongoing science missions show.

“The ice at the mid-latitudes is an important part of Mars’ water reservoir,” Karlsson said.

Scientists suspect the thick layer of dust covering the ice has saved if from evaporating out into space.

The study appears in this week’s Geophysical Research Letters.

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Buried Mars Glaciers are Brimming With Water