Frozen Water Discovered on Mars Could Fill Red Sea

A huge frozen ocean of water has been discovered buried deep beneath the surface of Mars.

The Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF) near the equator of the Red Planet has been known for years to be home to buried ice, but new data gathered by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has revealed this ice may be much more plentiful than we first thought, stretching several miles deep.

If all the ice was brought to the surface of Mars and melted, it would be enough to coat the entire planet with an ocean between 5 and 9 feet deep, according to a new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters revealing the discovery.

That’s enough water to fill the Red Sea on Earth and marks the largest deposit of water ice found on Mars, outside of the poles.

Ice was first suspected to be buried deep beneath the MFF in 2007, stretching around 1.6 miles beneath the surface, but scientists couldn’t be sure that it was water ice and not sediments of dust or ash. Now, this data confirms that the deposits are likely indeed ice, and go as deep as 2.3 miles.

“We’ve explored the MFF again using newer data from Mars Express’s MARSIS radar, and found the deposits to be even thicker than we thought: up to 3.7 km [2.3 miles] thick,” Thomas Watters, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution, and author of the paper and the original research in 2007, said in an ESA statement. “Excitingly, the radar signals match what we’d expect to see from layered ice, and are similar to the signals we see from Mars’s polar caps, which we know to be very ice-rich.”

The Medusae Fossae Formation is a section of Mars’ surface consisting of billion-year-old wind-sculpted features and huge dust deposits, stretching over 3,000 miles along the planet’s equator, bounding the cratered highlands of the south and the lowlands of the northern hemisphere.

“Given how deep it is, if the MFF was simply a giant pile of dust, we’d expect it to become compacted under its own weight,” co-author Andrea Cicchetti of the National Institute for Astrophysics, Italy, said in the ESA statement. “This would create something far denser than what we actually see with MARSIS. And when we modelled how different ice-free materials would behave, nothing reproduced the properties of the MFF—we need ice.”

These icy deposits aren’t anything like the glaciers here on Earth, however, as they are heavily contaminated with Mars dust and topped with a crust of rock and ash that is hundreds of feet deep.

This ice is hoped to reveal more about the secrets of Mars’ past, which is thought to have once been rich in water.

“This latest analysis challenges our understanding of the Medusae Fossae Formation, and raises as many questions as answers,” Colin Wilson, an ESA project scientist for Mars Express and the ESA ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) said in the statement. “How long ago did these ice deposits form, and what was Mars-like at that time? If confirmed to be water ice, these massive deposits would change our understanding of Mars’ climate history. Any reservoir of ancient water would be a fascinating target for human or robotic exploration.”

This discovery could even be tapped into by future astronauts, as liquid water would be essential to Mars missions.

“If this is ice, it would represent the most substantial low-latitude ice ever detected on Mars. From a human mission perspective, ice represents a valuable resource for life support and to generate fuel for the return trip home,” paper co-author Gareth A. Morgan, a Planetary Science Institute senior scientist, said in a Planetary Science Institute statement.

“Low latitudes are also very desirable for multiple reasons, the most important being temperature and solar energy due to the relatively high Sun angles. However, the potential ice deposits are buried under hundreds of meters of dry material and would be very difficult to extract.”

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