Huge Buried Water Glaciers Discovered on Mars

[Ichingcarpenter]

Source: wired News

Giant glaciers buried under the surface of Mars at much lower latitudes than any previously known ice are a potential source of drinking water for future astronauts.

The discovery, made using ground-penetrating radar on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, offers new possibilities in the search for life on the red planet.

"If there is life on Mars, this kind of ice would likely preserve ancient organisms and DNA," researcher Jim Head, a planetary geoscientist at Brown University, told Wired.com. "Examining the water ice could give you a good sample to try to detect if there had been life there."

The newly-discovered glaciers, reported Wednesday in Science, appear to contain the largest volume of Martian water ice outside the poles.

"Just one of the features we examined is three times larger than the city of Los Angeles, and up to one-half mile thick, and there are many more," said study leader John Holt of the University of Texas at Austin, in a press release.
Many scientists doubted that giant reservoirs of ice could exist on Mars so close to the equator, but calculations suggest these regions were once much colder than they are now, due to variations in the tilt of Mars' rotational axis. The ice was buried under debris, and as the areas warmed, the ice was insulated by its protective layer of surface rock.

Read more: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/huge-buried-wat.html

[MrScorpio]

1. Sounds like a great set up for Total Recall

Plus my own sci-fi graphic novel

[shadowknows69]

3. You have a sci fi graphic novel?

And you haven't sent me a copy yet? Autographed of course. B-)

[MrScorpio]

5. I have to draw it first

Think I gots da skillz?

[shadowknows69]

10. Absolutely and I'm stealing that as my new desktop with your permission

Need any help with plot or script you know where to find me right? 35+ year comic fan here. You could do worse.

[MrScorpio]

14. Steal away

What I really is a colorist

(Not to mention a pencil sharpener)

[YOY]

41. Talk to LerkFish.

Just a chance.

[No DUplicitous DUpe]

16. I'm impressed. Very nice work! nt

[no limit]

17. You drew that? Looks awesome!

You do any vector art work by any chance?

[MrScorpio]

22. Nope, no vector work

Pencil, pen and ink, water color and charcoal

Just the classics

[Ghost Dog]

32. Check out Iain M. Banks

if you haven't done so already...

[Aviation Pro]

8. I was just thinking the same thing....

...now where are all those giant heat generators to sublimate the ice to gas?

[aquart]

2. Wow.

[shadowknows69]

4. The martians live underground, mark my words

And pretty soon they're gonna get pissed at us spying on them. Ok, yeah, I'm a sci-fi geek, so sue me.

[relayerbob]

12. They already are

Haven't you noticed how many Mars probes mysteriously disappear? ;->

[debunkthelies]

20. Verrry Interresting!

:hide: :tinfoilhat:

[Soylent Brice]

6. i wonder if they can utilize these

for terra-forming.

:shrug:

[cobalt1999]

7. Makes it more possible that there is Subterranean Bacteria on Mars

It'd be great to be able to compare the DNA to life evolved on Earth.

[shadowknows69]

13. I was thinking the same thing

My bet is we'd find out some things that would make the creationists heads explode.

[cobalt1999]

21. Well creationists would just claim they were placed there by Satan

Same as all those dinosaur bones.

[alfredo]

9. Imagine putting ice cubes from that glacier in your drink.

[Uncle Joe]

11. "Ice Pirates" with Robert Ulrich was one hilarious Si Fi movie.

:)

But nowadays with global warming climate change here on Earth and discoveries like this, who knows?

[alfredo]

15. We are becoming Arrakis

[onehandle]

18. I just want them to find definite fossilized (or living) life there.

Please, oh please.

[shadowknows69]

37. I'm not sure they would tell us if they did

It's been pretty evident for a while that Mars was/is capable of supporting life, even as we know it, so considering the astounding variety of life that crawled from our oceans I'm sure Mars had its share. I think they've been breaking the news to us in small increments like this. Life elsewhere in the universe, while a fun concept for movies, would make a considerable number of people's heads explode. Fundies primarily.

[onehandle]

39. That's the pleasure I want.

Boom.

[bertman]

19. Before we got to Mars and fuck it up what say we get this planet back to normal.

[The Doctor.]

23. How come we never land at Cydonia?

[Posteritatis]

24. Probably because there's more interesting parts of the planet

They're trying to chase signs of water at this point, and Cydonia's not a likely bet for that sort of thing. The "face" was just an optical illusion as a result of the angle/lighting at the time.

[The Doctor.]

26. Oh, of that I have little doubt... have all the questions been answered just yet?

[Posteritatis]

28. About the face? Pretty much

It's been photographed from quite a few different angles now, and I think at least one of the probes in the last fifteen years or so had "take a look at the face" as one of its specific goals. From just about anything other than the angle of the Viking probes it's just a hill.

[The Doctor.]

29. So the 'Face on Mars' issue is solved...

Now if we can just get to the bottom of the Butt on Mercury....

I still find the other Cydonia stuff nifty.

[Systematic Chaos]

36. Don't be tutchin the but on Mercury!

:evilgrin:

[Ichingcarpenter]

25. More Details and Statistics of the findings

Most of the radar signal bounced off the ground, but some reached though the upper layer of rock to bounce around the interior of large ice deposits. The deposits in Mars's eastern Hellas basin alone contain an 800-metre-thick glacier and hide 28,000 cubic kilometres of water ice - enough to coat the entire planet with a layer of water 20 cm thick.

The glaciers likely formed during a time when Mars's pole pointed more towards the Sun, says co-author James Head of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Because Mars lacks a massive moon that can stabilise its tilt, the planet is thought to wobble dramatically every 120,000 years or so.

When its poles were tilted more towards the Sun during one such wobble, the more intense sunlight could have heated ice at the poles. That caused the ice to sublimate into the atmosphere and then condense down into solid ice again in areas near the equator - which at that time were colder, Head says. Rocky debris from nearby slopes then fell on the icy deposits.

Insulating layer

Over time, the upper layer of ice vaporised into the thin Martian atmosphere, concentrating the rocks so they formed an insulating layer. These rocks prevented the glacier from melting entirely when the Sun once again drenched the mid-latitude regions.

"It's kind of like the Hotel California. The ice checks in but it doesn't check out. It doesn't go back to the poles," Head told New Scientist. " tell you that significant amounts of water vapour can be transported from the poles to the mid-latitudes and that some of it - a lot of it - is still there."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16097-vast-stores-of-water-ice-surround-martian-equator.html

http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/newsroom/pressreleases/20081120a.html

[TrogL]

27. Why assume DNA?

Life on Mars could develop in a radically different fashion.

[The Doctor.]

30. Life requires a set of instructions of some kind.

DNA encoding is just the most feasible method of preserving and communicating those instructions.

If we find other life, it's highly probable that it uses DNA. But hey... ya never know.

[Posteritatis]

31. Even if it isn't, "DNA" will be laymanese for the equivalents most likely (nt)

[NickB79]

33. True, but it may use radically different nucleotides

We have 5 nucleotides that compose our DNA sequence (A,T,C,G, and U in RNA sequences in place of T). Who knows what other chemical variations might have arisen under different evolutionary conditions?

[xchrom]

34. recommend

[opihimoimoi]

35. Its the SPICE....soon there will be Cities of 50 million there The Spice is the focus of Life....

[shadowknows69]

38. If it was an oil deposit, we'll have that planet colonized within five years.

[Bake]

40. Maybe we ought to do something BOLD, like, you know, GO THERE AND CHECK IT OUT

Instead of sending up the space shuttle repeatedly to do high school science experiments while orbiting our own orb.

It's been 40+ years or so since anybody gave us a real challenge (like, say, going to the moon).

Bake

[opihimoimoi]

42. Budget cuts coming up will stifle space shit for awhile...thanks to Bush

and his BULL SHIT NOMICS

[cobalt1999]

43. We could do it robotically cheaper and faster.

[Bake]

44. There's no substitute for human eyes and experience.

I saw a program on one of the cable channels (I think it was NatGeo) about the two Mars rovers, which were incredible, of course. But all they could do (assuming the sun was out and the solar panels weren't dusty) was drive around and collect soil/rock samples. When one of the wheels on a rover broke, no one was there to repair it.

I just don't believe there is any substitute, ultimately, for the human presence in exploration.

Bake