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Martian Sea Discovered
mpesce writes "New Scientist is reporting that a large sea of frozen ice (between 800 and 900 km in size and 45 m deep) has been discovered by the ESA's Mars Express Probe. Here's the kicker: the sea of block ice is only five degrees away from the Martian equator. New Scientist also links to a PDF of a paper to be presented next month about the finding." Update: 02/21 15:30 GMT by T : Note: that's 45 meters deep, not 45 kilometers deep.
That's 45 meters deep, not kilometers.
That's 800km by 900km (i.e. 800km wide and 900km long). It isn't between 800km and 900km!
they have not detected any form of frozen sea, they have merely found some peculiar formations that they hyopthesise may be blocks of ice covered in volcanic ash (which has prevented it subliming into the atmosphere). Another hypothesis is that these formations may have been caused by lava flows.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
"(between 800 and 900 km in size and 45 km deep) "
;)
:)
According to TFA the depth is 45 METERS deep, not 45 KILOMETERS.
There is quite a difference between the two...
I didn't think so either...
The team of researchers, led by John Murray at the Open University, UK, estimates the submerged ice sea is about 800 by 900 kilometres in size and averages 45 metres deep.
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The
Here's the title of the article:
./ posting:
...that a large sea of frozen ice (between 800 and 900 km in size and 45 km deep) has been discovered...
./ poster even RTFA?
'Pack ice' suggests frozen sea on Mars
Here's the summary of the
Do
The proper term is "water ice" as opposed to "dry ice" which is frozen carbon dioxide.
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From some random site, the volume of Earth's oceans is 1.3*10^9 km^3. That's roughly 40,000 times as much water as what was just found on Mars. Inferring the existance of even more water on Mars, and taking into account the fact that Mars is smaller than Earth (surface area of Earth is ~ 6.65 times that of Mars?), you might say the avearge ocean depth of Earth is at most 6000 times greater than that of Mars. Not too friggin bad, let's terraform this sucker.
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That would be the Department of Redundancy Department.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
http://209.235.176.54/1741.pdf
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In other words the sae was frozen and had a lot sediments in it. As the surface evaporated the sediments were left on top. The sediments in conjunction with vlocanic ash effectively inusulates the sea underneath it.
Its kinda like an aquifer, except that in this case the aquifer is frozen!
Mars isn't flat, and the area of the sea surely isn't square, but a very rough estimation of the volume would be: 800,000 meters * 900,000 meters * 45 meters = 32,400,000,000,000 cubic meters = 8,559,174,460,226,494 gallons or in words 8.6 quadrillion gallons or 32.4 quadrillion liters.
AccountKiller
I assume they said that because the article states that any water that close to the equator should have melted by now, unless it was covered by some insulating material such as volcanic ash.
However there is an advantage to finding ice near the equator. If we wish to launch spacecraft from Mars the equator would be the best launching point, for the same reason we launch spacecraft from Earth as close to the equator as possible.
The water could be a potential source of fuel, thus it (assuming it is water) lying close to the equator would be advantageous for that reason.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
As exciting as the discovery is, The Slashdot summary reads like it's a done deal.
Actually, the article linked starts out with this (note the word "may" in the 1st sentence):
"A frozen sea, surviving as blocks of pack ice, may lie just beneath the surface of Mars, suggest observations from Europe's Mars Express spacecraft. The sea is just 5 north of the Martian equator and would be the first discovery of a large body of water beyond the planet's polar ice caps.
Images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express show raft-like ground structures - dubbed "plates" - that look similar to ice formations near Earth's poles, according to an international team of scientists."
The km as been French ever since the French invented the SI during the French revolution dipstick.
Double-check your math. It's pi * r^2, not pi * d^2, and the sea is 800 to 900 kilometers in size, not 800 to 900 meters. So it's really
(8.5*10^5 / 2)^2 * pi * 45
or 2.55E+13 cubic meters
or 6.74E+15 gallons.
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The phenomena is called ice fog.
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"The moon, for instance, is just in the right position to affect our tides so they aren't out of control."
Not really. We have tides because we have a moon. Without the moon, only the influence of the planets and the sun would affect our tides, which wouldn't amount to much.
The moon does act as a sort of gyro stabilizer. Because of it's influence, the axis of our planet wobbles in a fairly regular pattern, giving us seasons. Without the moon, that would become more erratic. Indeed, Earth could theoretically be spinning in all thre axes at once, which would make for some interesting weather patterns.
"I wonder what it would mean for Earth if we terraformed Mars, changed it's magnetic field. It might even effect life here."
Not likely. Mars at it's closest point is still 40 million miles away. Even if we possesed the technology to give Mars a stronger magnetic field (which we don't), the field strength drops of with the inverse square of the distance. And with the solar wind, that field would be infintismally small by the time it could reach Earth.
Short of blowing of a large chunk of Mars and sending it crashing into Earth, we're not going to affect our planet.
"I say we leave Mars alone before we kill ourselves."
I say we are far more likely to kill ourselves before we even make it to mars. But that's just my opinion.
Assuming we don't practice the great art of self-annihilation, we won't have much of choice of going to Mars in the relatively near future. Our planet is filling up. We have limited resources. We'll have to do something about that at some point.
There isn't anything we could do to Mars that would end up affecting this planet. We've already made enough of a mess of it already.
~X~
~X~
Well, there goes another snappy Slashdot post. 6.74E15 gallons is about 12% bigger than the capacity of all the Great Lakes. Since Mars has only about 28.4% Earth's surface area, that puts just this one reservoir in a league with a "Great Lakes" over 4x the size of ours. Now that is a lot of water, and maybe even a repository for Martian life.
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The confirmation that a large body of frozen water exists on Mars is excellent news for any future manned missions to the planet. Its presence means that Human beings could sustain themselves for much longer periods of time without the need to transport gallons of water for use when they get there. With the addition of green houses it is even possible that water might be of vital use in growing food for consumption on the surface of Mars.
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If Mars had water 5 million years ago on the surface then it may had a atmosphere then also
It has an atmosphere now!
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/facts/
We've seen microbes on ancient mars rocks
They saw structures inside the rocks that resembled bacteria, but they haven't found "microbes." They don't know for sure what they are.
http://www.unmuseum.org/marsrock.htm
Seriously though, one problem with making mars habitable enough to live on without domes or breathing equipment is exceedingly hard to beat. That is mar's mass isn't high enough to generate a gravity well large enough to sustain enough atmospheric pressure to live on the surface.
Even with a gradual depressurisation (of people wanting to survive on the surface without a complete space suit including some form of counterpressure) to martian pressure would be a killer.
As far as i am aware the planet's atmosphere is in equilibrium, that is, the amount of gasses there and the pressure they are at is sustained to the fullest extent of the gravity of the planet. Adding more gasses in some way to increase the atmospheric pressure would not help because it would boil off into space. And don't even get me started on the lack of a protective magnetic field.
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It's just like the possible methane - people are letting their imaginations run *way* ahead of the evidence.
= 418683#418683
Just a footnote: It turned out that this previous story regarding life on Mars turned out to just be shoddy journalism. The supposed "private meeting with space officials" was actually just a party. The researchers had no idea there was a reporter there, and the entire story was basically based on second-hand party gossip.
More details here:
http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p
A statement from one of the supposedly-quoted researchers:
A story has appeared in Space.com which quotes us
inaccurately and without permission. The story is based on hearsay
and is factually incorrect.
Here are the facts:
1. On Sunday night we were attending a private party
of space exploration enthusiasts in which there was a
discussion about the possible meaning of the results
from recent Mars missions. We engaged in the
discussion and expressed thoughts and opinions as
individual scientists on our own time and did not
represent ourselves as speaking for NASA.
2. No one at the party identified themselves as a
reporter, and in fact no reporters were present. This
article is based on hearsay about what somebody at the
party thought they heard us say. We think this
represents extremely poor journalistic standards.
3. No Nature paper has been submitted with Rio Tinto
results. This claim is simply wrong and we did not
make this claim. The MARTE project has several papers
in preparation that describe the work we are doing at
Rio Tinto and the first results of that work, but
nothing has been submitted yet. Preliminary results
have been published in abstract form at various
scientific meetings. If you want to see what the MARTE
team has actually said about results from Rio Tinto
drilling and its relevance to life on Mars, go to
www.marteproject.com and click on publications. All
our REAL publications are posted there.
4. The work at Rio Tinto is relevant to finding life
in a subsurface terrestrial environment and can't be
used to infer anything about life on Mars, directly.
The Rio Tinto work by its very nature can't tell us if
there is life on Mars, but certainly helps formulate
the strategy for how to search for life on Mars. One
approach to searching for extant life on Mars is by
drilling. Partly for this reason, the MARTE project
was selected for funding by NASA's ASTEP program, out
of the Science Mission Directorate and is a joint
project between NASA and Spain's Center for
Astrobiology
"We still don't have the missing link that Darwin himself said you better find before you even start thinking about calling this theory fact."
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