It has long been known that Mars has glaciers at its poles, but it now seems that they extend much further south and north, in both respective hemispheres.
Recent radar measurements by a number of satellites orbiting the planet have exposed the shapes of glaciers hidden by thick dust just below the surface. They have also been confirmed to be ice-water and not carbon dioxide (CO2).
While research has already pinpointed a great many glacial formations on the Martian surface, the new ones didn’t have good detailed high-resolution data.
Therefore, says Nature World News,
“The researchers supplemented the sparse data with information about the flow and form of the glaciers from the very well studied areas. Thus, they were able to calculate how thick and voluminous the ice is across the glacier belts.”
Nanna Bjørnholt Karlsson, a post-doctoral researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, is quoted by Discovery News, as saying:
“We have looked at radar measurements spanning ten 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.”
The glaciers, so far located, are in belts at latitudes between 30 degrees and 50 degrees – the equivalent to Northern Germany on Earth. However, they could spread as far as the equator. Indeed, the researchers say that there may be sufficient ice-water to cover the entire planet.
Karlsson explained,
“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.”
Normally speaking, the atmospheric pressure on Mars is so low that water ice simply evaporates and becomes water vapour, says Phys.org. Therefore, it is suspected that the thick covering of dust on the planet’s surface has stopped the glaciers from melting at lower altitudes.
So, instead of being just a dry, dusty old place, it now seems that there is even more to Mars than previously thought, and the planet continues to yield ever more interesting information.
The MailOnline says that Mars is now in the middle of an ice age. Therefore, temperatures are too low for liquid water to exist on its surface. However, we know that the planet did have warmer and wetter weather in the past.
The vast scale of these mid-altitude ice flows, extending so far south, reinforces the likelihood that the planet was once covered in oceans and lakes, where life could have evolved.
The study appears in this week’s Geophysical Research Letters.
