New NASA images show layers of ice peeking out of eroded cliffs—a potential boon for future humans on the red planet.
By Michael Greshko
National Geographic, 01.11.18
At sites across the midsection of Mars, scientists have found layers of water ice buried mere feet beneath the red planet’s surface. The discovery adds crucial detail to Mars’s geologic history, and it may shape how future humans on Mars get their water.
“This is a new window into ground ice on Mars,” says Colin Dundas, the U.S. Geological Survey geologist who co-discovered the ice layers.
Scientists have long theorized that reserves of water ice are locked underground on Mars. In 2002, the NASA Odyssey mission scanned the planet from orbit and detected signs of shallow ground ice at high latitudes. In 2008, the NASA Phoenix mission dug up water ice at its landing site near the Martian north pole.
And in late 2016, scientists using the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)found a buried ice sheet at Mars’s mid-latitudes that holds about as much water as Lake Superior. But until Dundas’s study, published today inScience, scientists struggled to understand the extent and accessibility of Mars’s subsurface ice layers.
The eight sites featured in the new study include steep banks where, much like cutting into a cake, erosion has exposed layers of rock and ice that MRO could see from overhead. The bands of ice first appear between three and six feet underground, supporting the notion that Mars’s mid-latitudes periodically saw large snowfalls millions of years ago, when Mars was tilted on its axis at a steeper angle than it is today, says Dundas.
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