Giant Pool of Water Ice at Mars' South Pole

[StrictlyRockers]

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070315_martian_beach.html

Giant Pool of Water Ice at Mars' South Pole
By Jeanna Bryner
Staff Writer
posted: 15 March 2007
02:01 pm ET

Mars is unlikely to sport beachfront property anytime soon, but the planet has enough water ice at its south pole to blanket the entire planet in more than 30 feet of water if everything thawed out.

With a radar technique, astronomers have penetrated for the first time about 2.5 miles (nearly four kilometers) beneath the south pole’s frozen surface. The data showed that nearly pure water ice lies beneath.

Discovered in the early 1970s, layered deposits of ice and dust cap the North and South Poles of Mars. Until now, the deposits have been difficult to study closely with existing telescopes and satellites. The current advance comes from a probe of the deposits using an instrument aboard the Mars Express orbiter.

“This is the first time that a ground-penetrating system has ever been used on Mars,” said the new radar study’s lead author, Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “All the other instruments used to study the surface of Mars in the past really have only been sensitive to what occurs at the very surface.”

Deep probe (oh baby!)

Plaut and his colleagues probed the deposits with radar echo sounding, typically used on Earth to study the interiors of glaciers. The instrument, called the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding, or MARSIS, beams radio waves which penetrate the planet’s surface and bounce off features having different electrical properties.

The reflected beams revealed that 90 percent or more of the frozen polar material is pure water ice, sprinkled with dust particles. The scientists calculated that the water would form a 36-foot-deep ocean of sorts if spread over the Martian globe.

Interesting...

Ice skating on Mars, anyone?

[whistle]

1. Mars going through global warming also? Uhmmm, maybe it is solar flares and sun spots

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

2. What about the North Pole?

No ice at all there? Or is there the possibility of even more water?

[Crunchy Frog]

4. Frozen CO2. n/t

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

5. You're saying the CO2 is 100%?

That would be extremely interesting, if one pole had a great deal of water and another pole had none, zero, nada. I'd like to know the scientific explanation for that.

[Crunchy Frog]

6. I honestly don't know. I think I read it somewhere, but I'm not sure.

[Crunchy Frog]

7. Oops! It looks like I remembered wrong.

:blush:

Until recently, it was thought that both martian polar caps consisted largely of frozen carbon dioxide, with a small amount of water ice. This idea dates back to 1966, when the first Mars spacecraft determined that the martian atmosphere was largely carbon dioxide. Scientists at the time argued that the ice caps themselves were solid carbon dioxide and that the caps regulate the atmospheric pressure by evaporation and condensation.

Later observations by the Viking orbiters showed that the north polar cap contained water ice underneath its dry ice covering; however, experts continued to believe that the south polar cap was made of dry ice. In 2003, California Institute of Technology researchers Andy Ingersoll and Shane Byrne argued, on the basis of high-resolution and thermal images from Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey, respectively, that the martian polar ice caps are made almost entirely of water ice – with just a smattering of frozen carbon dioxide at the surface. These images showed flat-floored, circular pits 8 meters deep and 200 to 1,000 m in diameter at the south polar cap, and an outward growth rate of about one to three meters per year. Infrared measurements from Mars Odyssey showed that the lower material heats up, as water ice is expected to do in the martian summer, and that the polar cap is too warm to be dry ice. Based on this evidence, Byrne and Ingersoll concluded that the pitted layer is dry ice, but the material below, which makes up the floors of the pits and the bulk of the polar cap, is water ice. This shows that the south polar cap is similar to the north pole, which was determined, on the basis of Viking data, to lose its one-meter covering of dry ice each summer, exposing the water ice underneath. The new results show that the difference between the two poles is that the south pole dry-ice cover is slightly thicker – about eight meters – and doesn't disappear entirely during the summertime.
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/M/Marspoles.html

Well, at least I remembered that one of the poles was thought to be H2O, and the other one CO2.
:dunce:

[leftchick]

3. perhaps we could import some to Earth?

antarctica and greenland are in dire need of ice right now. :(