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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.
A large sea of frozen ice??
:)
As opposed to the other kinds of ice, like liquid ice or gaseous ice?
Here's your sign...
Awesome, though. I can't wait for us to terraform Mars, and start our new civilization there.
And eventually ruin that planet as well.
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Not like the kind we get here, then.
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!!!!!
Woot!
err maybe not, still not enough information but I tell ya all those stories I read growing up seem a little closer now - Edgar Rice Burroughs maybe was a little off in his vision of the planet - but Kim Stanley Robinson or Aurthor C. Clarkes visions may be in reach now. With water on the planet , and it being accessible to us gives any future mission to mars a valuable resource.
I'm 'pumped' so to speak.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
"(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.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
... is a bewildered and gasping Arnold Schwarzenegger waiting for the nuclear heating coils to kick in.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
In other news, Michelle Kwan has announced she will be training for the 2006 Olympics on a secret "remote" location, devoid of paparazzi.
Insiders say she also aquired a new sponser, an undisclosed candy bar manufacturer..
...if we melt the water. And my tounge in cheek Mars Hydro website may well fortell a commercial future too? :-)
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
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
Now astronauts (or kosmonauts or taikonauts or whatever gets first over there) don't have to take ice with them if they want to have a whisky on the rocks.
Hmm... maybe I could start a first "bar galactica" and make tons by selling spacetourists stiff drinks at high rates.
"Joe, one lump of frozen ice in my drink if you please!"
He's just colonizing in the name of the Drexciyan Wavejumpers.
RIP James.
-mkb
Well, you see, the whole attraction of mars is that people can go there, terraform it, and then greenhouse the shit out of it and say "Well it was a barren waste land anyways".
Mars will be the Las Vegas of environmental concerns!
I could just picture first detailed images of the sea coming back with a frozen martian with a slightly suprised look on its face frozen under the ice. :-)
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
It wasn't too long ago that the guys from the Science magazine compiled their list of the 10 most important breakthroughs of 2004. Ranked 1 were the Mars rovers. For all I remember, Mars Express delivered probably at least as many new insights, if not more, but it was notably missing in that list. Why's that? Just because it doesn't have wheels to drive around, or is it the lack of an american flag on its side? Or what exactly is it that puts the rovers into a league of their own?
Sustainability and energy independence essay
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.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
It's amazing to me that the submitter could make three errors in the first half of the first sentence of his submission.
It's not between 800 and 900 in size, it is 800 by 900.
It's 45 meters deep, not km.
Frozen ice? Well, duh.
it's powers of observation and recounting as keen as these that make eye witness testimony so compelling.
I wonder if Martians can ice skate? If so, perhaps we could import them here and have a hockey season. Imagine ESPN's ratings for the Mars Cup!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
http://209.235.176.54/1741.pdf
Its temp webspace for www.foxcheck.org. Have fun. And we want to live in peace with our /. overlords!
Who came with that stupid idea to name a planet after candy bar, anyway? That's outrageous!
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!
If we could terraform Mars, do you really think it would be hospitable? There's more to Earth than water and oxygen that makes it possible for life to live here. The moon, for instance, is just in the right position to affect our tides so they aren't out of control. And the magnetic field that helps move that nasty radiation around us... I wonder what it would mean for Earth if we terraformed Mars, changed it's magnetic field. It might even effect life here. I say we leave Mars alone before we kill ourselves.
- Tylo
Here's the kicker: the sea of block ice is only five degrees away from the Martian equator.
I have to admit I don't know a lot about this yet... but why is it such a "kicker" that the ice is so near the equator?
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
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
FTA: 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.
If it is indeed frozen H2O like in Antarctica, there is a possibility that it also contains liquid water within the ice. To the surprise of explorers, that was found in Antarctica.
I tried to find a link to that information but I couldn't find anything good. My source is this Antarctica documentary
I wonder what the temperature variation is on the Mars equator. Theoretically, how would that temperature variation affect a body of water of that size?
1st it is warmer near the equator, so... so that would be a nicer place to live.
2nd if it can exist near the equator, it might also be found in the colder areas.
850m^2 * pi * 45m is 102,141,031m^3, which is 2.7E10 gallons. Ice is 107.5% the volume of its water mass, 2.5E10 gallons. Which is about 15-20% the size of only one of the NYC upstate reservoirs. Perhaps documenting the process by which this ice collected and buried will explain whether there was any other water, and where it went.
--
make install -not war
Isn't the much more important mistake that they don't actually know that it's water?
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."
Everyone knows that nature is static, and how things were 50, 100, or 1000 years ago are the way that they should be today, tomorrow, and forever!
The reason why large scale or long-term changes to the environment are so risky is not, as you mistakenly state, that nature is static. Rather, it is that nature is highly dynamic on time scales spanning millennia and we don't understand the dynamics yet. A significant change that we think produces benefits may, in the long term, have devastating consequences.
Once we understand natural systems sufficiently well to be able to predict the consequences of our actions in the long term, then we can engage in deliberate planet-wide engineering efforts, here on earth on on Mars. Until then, anything that alters our atmosphere, oceans, or ecology significantly is Russian roulette.
We can strip mine the rest later!
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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