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Massive Martian Glaciers Found

Posted by timothy on from the could-be-a-trick dept.

Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Scientific American is reporting that 'data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter point to vast glaciers buried beneath thin layers of crustal debris.' Data from the surface-penetrating radar on MRO revealed that two well-known mid-latitude features are composed of solid water ice. One is about three times the size of the City of Los Angeles. This certainly makes the idea of establishing a station on Mars far more plausible."

9 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. Time to move... by kainewynd2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And it's about time. Now we just need to get some "volunteers" to get on a spaceship...

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    I just don't get... eh, ugh... never mind. This post wasn't worth the research I put into it.
    1. Re:Time to move... by SirLurksAlot · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Me first!

      Yes indeed, you first! I'll be satisfied to have myself cryogenically frozen (Did I happen to mention you first for that too?) and thawed out in a generation or three when the colonization effort is well under way. Guess I'm not much for a.) getting slowly cooked by solar radiation b.) constantly worrying about a hole the size of a pinprick sucking all the atmosphere out of the ship, c.) either losing my sanity in the confines of ship I can't leave for months on end or waiting for my fellow shipmates to do the same and d.) finally arriving at my destination which is even less hospitable and almost certainly more dangerous than life on the ship.

      Seriously, the first people to go to Mars would almost have to have a deathwish to do so.

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      God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
    2. Re:Time to move... by Idiomatick · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "Seriously, the first people to go to Mars would almost have to have a deathwish to do so."
       
        Replace mars with the new world and it holds true. Your points a, c and d also hold true. For b if you change it to sinking then you are right there too. I'm pretty fucking sure the first people on mars will be remembered as heroes for a loooooong time.

    3. Re:Time to move... by tirefire · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Why move to Mars? Gee. Maybe because it's ANOTHER. FUCKING. PLANET. I'm only 19 years old. By current health standards I'm maybe 1/4 of the way through my life. And I'd give the rest of my life up, right now, for a one-way ticket to Mars. I don't care if I wouldn't come back to Earth, I don't care if I'd only live for a week or two on Mars before my food ran out. It's MARS. Issue me a cyanide pill and I'll clock myself out right before my life support fails. I'll be dead and you'll be alive. But I'll have done more in my one week on Mars than any other 6+ billion people will ever accomplish in their pathetic little lives on Earth.

    4. Re:Time to move... by Saffaya · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You are forgetting we still haven't actually resolved the problem of preventing crew irradiation during their travel to/from Mars.
      That is a show-stopper, 100% chance of being irradiated beats the off-chance to get a new world disease.
      Shielding rises the mass of the vehicule, which is already a problem that forces us to a slow travel due to our limitation to chemical rockets.

      We need to switch to a different and better propulsion system like a nuclear one in order to escape this quagmire of Shield/mass+length of travel compounded problem.

  2. Fossil water by RsG · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What's interesting to me, is that they mention in TFA that this ice can't have formed recently. The current Martian climate won't allow it. Meaning that the glacier was laid down ages ago when such formations were still possible, got buried beneath the debris, and has basically been sitting there since.

    Forget water harvesting, I'm more interested in studying the ice in situ. If there ever was life on Mars (which is independent of the question of whether there's life there now), the odds are good we'd find evidence of it frozen in the glacier. Cold preserves, objects frozen in ice erode slowly, and the living things generally need water to survive.

    Of course, anything that ever lived on Mars would likely have been microscopic. I doubt we'd find anything as big as a terrestrial animal. It'd still be the first evidence of life outside of our own planet though, which is a pretty frickin' huge deal.

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    Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
  3. Re:Why? by lysergic.acid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    because scientists don't like to use vague and imprecise language.

    if "ice" means "water ice," then what do you say when you just want to refer to ice of any kind?

  4. Phoenix mission a waste? by Dr_Banzai · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder if this discovery had been made a few months earlier if they would have altered the course of the Phoenix lander to try to touch down on the glacier. Or is the crust on top of the glacier too thick for Phoenix to get through? This seems like a prime target for future missions to analyze the ice and look for signs of life.

    I think we need to send Bruce Willis and a crack team of oil rig workers to do some drilling on Mars...

  5. UNDERGROUND CITIES by sanman2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So find some ice-filled underground caverns and make the first colonies there. Build some large graphene "world domes" above them, as greenhouses to grow crops in. Mars is very geologically stable, so humans can expand their presence underground like an expanding ant colony, while building large graphene bubbles topside for agriculture.