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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...
... 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!"
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!
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?
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!
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!
But even a minor increase in atmospheric pressure would have a massive impact on the feasability and safety of large domes, for instance, because it would even out the pressure difference between the outside and inside of a habitable dome.
Just getting to a temperature and atmosphere where humans won't die instantly without a suit, or can work/survive outside in warm clothes and an oxygen mask will have a dramatic impact on how easy it will be to have a sustained presence, and the safety of a colony that would otherwise have to have massive safeguards against damages to habitats.
Keep in mind that there are many areas on earth that are extremely inhospitable. While it would be great if Mars could once be as hospitable as the more pleasant areas of the earth, that doesn't mean that less won't still make it possible (or even interesting) to live there.
Humans are quite resilient.
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?
Isn't the much more important mistake that they don't actually know that it's water?
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.
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.
"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~