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Enormous Amount of Frozen Water Found on Mars
schweini writes "Space.com is reporting that the Mars Express probe's MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding) experiment has detected and measured an enormous amount of water ice near Mars' south pole, which would be sufficient to submerge the whole planet's surface underneath approximately 10m of water on average."
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age _031208.html
Its always fun saying "Mars has global warming" to a room full of people who consider themselves "educated enough to know that global warming denial is an unscientific crock". You first get a bit of laughter, and then about 15 seconds later the implication dawns on them, and they'll say the satellites were busted, the protocols unscientific, and that whatever boring astronomer produced the result must be a stooge for Big Carbon.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Let's see. By all accounts we're producing too much CO2 on Earth, meanwhile our closest neighbour is just begging for some CO2 to trigger a bit of global warming and make the planet nice and cosy.
OK. A bit simplistic, but you can't help wondering...
According to this article http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=05 -P13-00024&segmentID=7 the chances are high... Here is an extract
BURDICK: It is surprisingly difficult. I spent some quality time with a microbiologist at the Jet Propulsion Lab out in Pasadena, and this guy works in the spacecraft assembly facility where they build, well they built the Mars Rovers that are now out there on Mars. And this guy, his job is to kind of inspect what's left over and to see well, gosh, did any microbes survive the incredibly kind of harsh decontamination process that we've devised to get rid of them? And to his great surprise they have, and he's found at least one microbe that not only thrives in the spacecraft assembly facility, but seems to have actually evolved in it. It's a tough little spore, it eats aluminum. He found it growing on the surface of one of the Mars Rovers. It forms these spores and then the spores kind of group together to form a little, what he calls an igloo. It looks kind of like a macaroon under a microscope and when he cuts it open and exposes it to the light detection techniques that NASA's developed to look for life, he finds no sign of life and then when he puts this little igloo back together, the microbe comes back to life amazingly. And I asked him, "So you know you found this thing on the Mars Rover when it was being built. Do you think it's up there on Mars right now?" And he said, "oh yes, I'm quite certain, I'm almost certain that it is." So you know, I mean, it's just indicative of how life wants to spread. Either they're moving around inadvertently with us or they're moving around intentionally with us, but they are kind of reflections of our ambition, our desire to reshape the nature around us in a way that makes us more comfortable. You know, we can kind of demonize these things, but in a way they're really kind of impressive little critters. They're sort of doing what nature permitted them to do. And in a Darwinian sense, I mean, they're winners. I mean you've got to be, even if you don't like aliens, and there is quite a number of reasons not to, I think it's worthwhile sort of stopping and at least being impressed by their ability to thrive in a world that we think that we dominate. So far as we know, Earth is the only planet with life on it and the wind is blowing outward. We may well be the dandelion in the solar system.
Interesting...
Never happened. True story.
Wouldn't evaporating or boiling some of the water via nuclear reactors
Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure...
Seriously do you have any idea of the amount of energy involved to do what you propose? Here's a hint: multiply 1370 W/m^2 minus 590 W/m2 by the cross sectional area of mars (around 3.6 x 10^13 m^2) to give you 2.7 x 10^16 Watts.
That's pretty much around the amount of energy you need to produce with your nuclear reactors to keep mars at around earthlike temperatures... To put this in perspective, a 1 Megaton nuclear device has a yield of around 4 x 10^15 Joules. You would need to be exploding the equivalent of 6 of these devices on the planet EVERY SECOND to generate enough energy. Then there's the problem of distributing the heat evenly...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.