Vast Subsurface Martian Ice Discovered

The Fun Guy writes to tell us New Scientist is reporting that deep-scan radar results from ESA's Mars Express spacecraft have revealed vast amounts of subsurface ice. From the article: "Intriguingly, the signal reflected from the bottom of the crater is so strong and appears so flat that it may be liquid water. 'If you put water there, that's what the signal might look like,' Johnson told New Scientist. But he cautions the data is based on only one pass over the region and could be caused by another material."

Comments

Terraforming

[richcoder]

To anyone in the know, what implications would this have on the possible terraforming of mars to have a hospitable atmosphere?

Re:Terraforming

[MightyMartian]

I really can't imagine how the terraforming idea is going to be tenable over the long term. Even if you can figure out a way to bulk-up the atmosphere to raise surface temperatures sufficiently for water to exist in a liquid state, the gravity of Mars is to weak to sustain such an atmosphere, which will leak off over time. You would essentially have to keep adding to the atmosphere.