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Lots of Pure Water Ice At Mars North Pole
brink2012 writes "Planum Boreum, Mars' north polar cap contains water ice 'of a very high degree of purity,' according to an international study. Using radar data from the SHARAD (SHAllow RADar) instrument on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), French researchers say the data point to 95 percent purity in the polar ice cap. The north polar cap is a dome of layered, icy materials, similar to the large ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica, consisting of layered deposits, with mostly ice and a small amount of dust. Combined, the north and south polar ice caps are believed to hold the equivalent of two to three million cubic kilometers (0.47-0.72 million cu. miles) of ice, making it roughly 100 times more than the total volume of North America's Great Lakes, which is 22,684 cu. kms (5,439 miles).
The study was done by researchers at France's National Institute of Sciences of the Universe (Insu), using the Italian built SHARAD radar sounder on the US built MRO. SHARAD looks for liquid or frozen water in the first few hundreds of feet (up to 1 kilometer) of Mars' crust by using subsurface sounding. It can detect liquid water and profile ice.
Mars southern polar cap was once thought to be carbon dioxide ice, but ESA's Mars Express confirmed that it is composed of a mixture of water and carbon dioxide.
The study on Mars north polar cap appears in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union."
This is the worst written summary I have seen in ages. With all the unit conversions, I wonder if this guy is a former engineer for an old NASA Mars probe team...
tough to skate on the canals in winter without water.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Yea just look what the salt industry did to our oceans, we can't even drink of the ocean anymore.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Sufficient Gravity - Check
Sufficient Sunlight - Check
Friable surface (soil) - Check
Sufficient Source of water - check
Sufficient Atmosphere - ummmmm
Sufficient Magnetosphere - uh oh
Cigar - Nope.
Close, but no cigar.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
We're still looking for the way to get the Bourbon over there though.
Martian Water!
4 billion years old, untouched by mankind!
Unique solar system chemistry boosts your base DNA!
Live longer!
Improve your love life!
Martian Water: Now only $1,000 a liter!
This is my sig.
We have a name for a mixture of water and carbon dioxide. It's called "seltzer water". With added impurities, it's sold as "soft drinks".
Mmmm ... Martian dust cola. Satisfies your body's need for hundreds of trace minerals.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
... drinking "Exotic, pure Martian water" from 30ml bottles that cost $15000 a pop.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Right, but now we know where to get a refill...
[blockquote]Combined, the north and south polar ice caps are believed to hold the equivalent of two to three million cubic kilometers (0.47-0.72 million cu. miles) of ice, making it roughly 100 times more than the total volume of North America's Great Lakes, which is 22,684 cu. kms (5,439 miles). [/blockquote]
OK, so how many libraries of congress, or Niagra Falls is this? All joking aside, how does this relate to single units of glaciers or land masses, not non-continguous lakes. For example, how many Antarctica's is this? Or how many of our own polar ice caps? Hell, just tell me how many deep Greenland would be covered in ice!
I know we need things to make volumes, sizes, distances and other units seem real but let's choose something that we all can relate to, that makes sense, eh? Great Lakes just seems really a) North American centric, b) non-sensical to most U.S.ians like myself.
Sorry for the complaint. I know you do your best with these things. Perhaps it is the lack of Vitamin D and the seasonal affective disorder amongst some of us Northern Hemispherians that make me cranky.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
where is the secret chamber of air and atmosphere?
You don't think some people would line up to buy it? Shuttleworth would be there.
wrong
....then someone/thing took a poop in it.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Who cares about water ?
Just discover petroleum on another planet, and there will be a tough competition to get there !
To paraphrase the words of Hauser/Quaid, "Get [our collective] ass[es] to Mars!"
Landers are cool, 'bots are cool, but people are better!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Wooo.. Time to go to mars.. Bottle some water there and bring it back.. Pre-order today you mars water! 100$ per ounce
and sending it down to hit store shelves?
If they can have "iceberg" water, I'm sure Mars water will also have an audience:
http://www.finewaters.com/Bottled_Water/Canada/Berg.asp
Me? I'm going into the dihydrogen monoxide business.
And it's not just around our Sun and our Moon anymore! What the hell is going on?! What is oozing out of our ground?!
Fresh water has and is contributing to the continued salinization of our oceans. Originally as water is a solvent and streams/rivers dissolved rock on its way to the ocean and left it there with evaporation, now with all the salt on the roads in the winter plus 6 billion people urinating all over the place.
I wonder if it ever have a bad effect though, considering that we use the ocean as our toilet and food source at the same time.
Errr, yeah, sure... Gotcha. Pure water is undrinkable, mineral water is a-ok... I think I'm missing something here.
mixture of water and carbon dioxide
Club soda! I'll bring the cognac and lemon.
garbage in, garbage out
rewriting history since 2109
"Mar's"?
They have discovered ice at the north pole !!!
Maybe you could help the author out by providing some citations for your claim that pure water is undrinkable. While it's true that the human body needs minerals, there are plenty in food. They do not have to come from the water you drink.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
There is a widespread urban myth that distilled water is harmful. I've heard it all my life. Look at all the discussion at these sites. Some say there are benefits, some say it'll kill you. Too bad KiwiCanuck didn't "research a little more."
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Staht Da Reactah! http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1312
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Get your ice from mars !!!!!
So the water is 95% "pure" - what's in the 5%? For comparison Earth's oceans are about 96.5% "pure" so the water on Mars certainly would not be drinkable without processing but that's fairly easily done, I think.
Nate
Let me be the third to cry BOLLOCKS ! And besides, how hard would it be to add a pinch of martian soil to each cup you drink.
Two points
1: they say this water is 90% pure, that is FAR from what most people would consider pure water. The "natural mineral water" you buy in the shop is more than 99.9% pure water.
2: a local supply of water that has to be treated (either by adding stuff or more likely removing stuff) to be drinkable is still far preferable to carting water all the way from earth.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Yeah, that's funny because western Travis County regularly prescribes boiling your water before using it because the wells dry up and the water supply is not reliable.
I figure the myth came about because pure water doesn't have any nutritive benefit apart from being water (unlike your regular complement of minerals in the tap).
-l
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What's even crazy is the FISH.
Get this: the fish breathe the water, they poop AND pee in the water, they drink the water and they eat other things that also live in the water.
I mean, they basically live their entire lives in the water they crap in.
Yeast are like that, too.
Anyhow, I'm gonna go grab me a tall, frosty mug of yeast shit infested water.... I mean beer...
It's not undrikable, but yes, but the human body does use minerals in water. Which is why your not suposed to go about drinking the distiled water.
You could ask the yeast how that worked out for them, but once they caused your beer to be sufficiently alcoholic, they were killed off by their own waste product.
So, we somehow melt (some of) the ice, it evaporates to form oceans and clouds, which kick-starts a water-rich atmospheric cycle. Can someone more knowledgeable than I in these matters please explain whether there's any possibility of this working, or have I just seen too many sci-fi movies?
I replied to your post but your sig did not load. I think there is a problem, you might want to check it out.
blow out the planet and finish the discussion.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Okay, the volume is approximately equal to 25,000,000,000,000 apples.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
as W.C. Fields said, "Water? No thanky you....fish FUNCtion in it!"
Since Mars's Surface Area = 144 million km^2, this implies (for 2.5 million km^3 of ice) that ice caps are enough to supply a water layer 17 meters deep over the entire surface, or maybe 50 meters deep in Hellas and the Northern lowlands, if it was all melted. (If the polar caps entirely melted, that alone would raise the surface pressure above the triple point of water, so liquid water would be possible. The Hellas Basin is deep enough that the pressure is above the triple point now, and it definitely could have liquid water in it if the climate warmed some.)
Note that the polar caps show very clear signs of layering, presumably caused by the long period obliquity oscillations, and are in general very young geologically, so it is not beyond belief that, say, the Hellas basin fills up with water on a regular basis, every 500,000 years or so.
Heh, you crap in your medium too (air). Its just not as viscous as the fishes.
The last time I posted on this - pointing out that so far 100% of the actual planets we've explored have been inhabited - someone replied repeatedly emphasising the words "on Earth" - whereas my entire point was that this view is "Earth exceptionalism". Other than a few vague words in a book written over 2000 years ago by one small Middle Eastern tribe, we have no written statement on the subject (while most Indians religions support a plurality of worlds.)
Mars may not be inhabited by life, it may never have been - but we are now seeing a lot more water than previously believed, and evidence of methane generation. The probability must be assessed as non-zero.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
A cow could die upstream and wipe out a village.
Seriously, people drank beer and wine for a very good reason. It was sanitary and wouldn't kill you like the water would.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
A cow could die upstream and wipe out a village.
Seriously, people drank beer and wine for a very good reason. It was sanitary and wouldn't kill you like the water would.
Also, if you drink enough of it, you stop caring about all the cow corpses lying around!
Screw you guys I'm going to Mars.
The ocean is like a giant toilet!
Where do you live that people are peeing all over the place? A bus depot?
Like that lady trying to win a Wii for her kids by drinking water?
I drank what? -- Socrates
It may be 95% pure, but it's that other 5% that turns you into mutant zombies.
Brains!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Try snorting tap water into your nose. When you do, you'll have a good, practical understanding of osmosis.
I can see a Perrier sponsored Mars exploration mission.
I speak England very best
Does this improve the chances of finding water at the poles of the Moon ? After all there's still a ( very ) slim chance that we could actually establish a viable colony / base there, before we run out of energy.
This is why IVs are based on saline solution and not distilled water.
That isn't to say that you can't drink distilled water, in fact if you drank distilled water and then sucked on salt you'd prolly be fine. It is just easier to have the salt pre-dissolved in the water you are drinking.
Additionally, salinating water is much easier than desalinating.
Also, if you drink enough of it, you stop caring about all the cow corpses lying around!
I was wondering what that smell was...
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Also, if you drink enough of it, you stop caring about all the cow corpses lying around!
Then you wake up the next morning and realize they are all dead because you went on a drunken cow tipping binge.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Surely they could do better than just 95% pure!
How about Abiogenic oil?
I came here for the Total Recall jokes; I can't believe I'm leaving disappointed. /., what has become of you?
Oh,
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Go explore the great wikipedia further and look up "homeostasis" and "buffering" (of the homeostatic type, you'll have to use a disambiguation link, I'm guessing... or start with a term like osmoregulation). Then look up "diffusion" and "active transport".
A few things about "mineral water": the reason you have to pee after you drink a lot of it is that the water diffuses into your body, triggering a homeostatic reaction that excretes the excess water. Water diffuses in living cells on this planet, and diffusion means it moves from a volume where the ion (salt) content is high through semipermeable membranes into volumes where the ion concentration is relatively low. There is no active transport of H2O molecules in terrestrial cellular life. Isotonic water -- which will taste quite salty to you -- will just stay in your intestines, rather than diffusing out of them. You may find yourself with very wet poo if you drink a lot of it, but otherwise it won't provoke urinary urgency or thirst. Hypertonic water -- really mineralized water -- will cause water to diffuse out of your body into your digestive tract, and you will feel thirsty.
The ions in solution in the water do not cross terrestrial life's semipermeable membranes by diffusion; they are actively transported. Mineralized water at most slows the passive diffusion of water by having a slightly lower osmotic difference between the mineral water and the rest of the body. The minerals would have to be actively transported out of the water.
Note that there are plenty of ions in whatever food you eat, and the concentration of them is much higher than in any water that you would be able to drink without gagging or vomiting. Active transport in your intestines moves them across the semipermeable membranes quite well.
Once the salts and other useful ions are moved into your circulatory system they are either concentrated into long term storage (mainly in bones) or float about in solution mediated by hormones that control thirst, urinary urgency, (probably but not definitively) salt cravings, and (more speculatively) pica.
Mineral water is usually 250-500 ppm (0.025%-0.05%) of dissolved ions. In vertebrates (including humans) the intracellular and extracellular fluids are usually carrying several percent (2-7%) dissolved solids.
From an osmosis perspective, the dissolved solids in mineral water, compared to tap water, is inconsequential. Bottled mineral water will still cause water toxicity taken in large quantities all at once, and the difference between death by bottled water and death by maximally pure distilled water will in a standard human amount to a couple of millilitres. Sports drinks are usually 6% sugar and ~0.5-2% dissolved ions and are isotonic, so you can drink an awful lot of it all at once without risk. (For a standard human, 10 litres of distilled, tap or bottled mineral water taken all at once will kill by water toxicity; sports drinks are more likely to kill by mechanical damage from forced expansion of the digestive tract, or by metabolic crisis from trying to process tens of thousands of kilocalories worth of sugars all at once -- maybe a hundred litres might do it, if you could figure out how to avoid massive explosive diarrhea and vomiting reflexes from defeating your attempt to find the upper limit.)
Finally, wrt water toxicity, the problem is mainly that the kidney can only filter out a few litres of urine an hour, and taking in water faster than that -- whether that water is in the form of wet food, or from the tap, or from alcoholic drinks, or from a water distillation apparatus --will overwhelm buffering responses by organs other than the kidney (osteoclasts, vacuole-stored ions), as well force its way through semipermeable membranes in the brain, causing tissue-damaging swelling. That cerebral oedema is the usual cause of death in water toxicity; it would be very strange if it was electrolyte imbalance involving other organs that did an otherwise hea
Won't the desalination from the ice caps melting make this a wash?
Two liters of distilled water won't make you seek. If you drink JUST distilled water AND don't eat anything, then yes, after several days you will have some problems.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
The density is more important than the viscosity in this case. If my crap floated in air... man, to be an astronaut.
Speaking of water on Mars -- Would I be gay if I had sex with a parthenogenic humanoid. Even if that humanoid was an enemy of mine?
Take my wife, please.
She's so frigid, she'll fit right in with the frozen polar ice caps.
> a tall, frosty mug of yeast piss infested water.... I mean beer...
There, fixed that for you
No, because there's more salt water in the ocean than fresh water in the glaciers. Think it through.
Shards? come on! start using real acronyms, science. MRO is better.
Are you sure? It loaded for me, you should try again, I'm sure it will work the next time.
That ice will make clean smooth vodka.
The ocean is like a giant toilet!
It's not "like" a giant toilet, it "IS" a giant toilet. I 've used it quite a few times.
And I've seen other HUGE people do the same.
Seriously, people drank beer and wine for a very good reason. It was sanitary and wouldn't kill you like the water would.
Yeah, that's the reason folks drank booze. It very clearly had nothing to do with getting a buzz out of it, getting "biblical" with the town wenches or because it made your "village blond" wife appear smarter.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
You never know, people have been known to pay for the extraordinary.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Best comparison I came up with was the Mediterranean which is a bit bigger, but not much.
Wow. You're looking like a real tool, eh?
now with all the salt on the roads in the winter plus 6 billion people urinating all over the place.
NO, NO! It IS the $alt companies. They make their $alt from disgusting chemicals and then force us to eat them!
And the excess, they pour into the ocean! I recall, as a young lad, I swam in a $alt free ocean!
And that was before M$ bought up all the $alt companies!
Now, all we have is recycled sea salt to flavour our Aragula!
.
.
- aqk
F U
A cow could die upstream and wipe out a village.
Seriously, people drank beer and wine for a very good reason. It was sanitary and wouldn't kill you like the water would.
Just as today, drinking water in some places (Mexico) is unsafe and everyone drinks cola or juice.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
If by "pure", you mean swimming with parasites, fungi, and bacteria, sure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterborne_diseases
There's a reason we chlorinate water.
Obliquely related - what is shit? Existence. Science. Flavor. Manifestation. Shit. http://aalhadsaraf.blogspot.com/2008/08/existence-science-flavor-manifestation.html