Water Brothers on Ice

Posted on by

Debris-covered glaciers on Mars

The new issue of Science groks the fullness of Mars’ missing water:

In a discovery that partly answers the question of where all the water went on Mars, scientists have found vast, debris-covered glaciers much nearer the equatorial region than anyone had expected, according to a report today in the journal Science.

The glaciers, estimated to contain at least as much water as Lake Huron and possibly as much as the entire Great Lakes, were found by ground-penetrating radar on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft.

The NASA computer graphic above shows Martian craters (left) and the distribution of debris-covered glaciers within them (right).

Discover more from File 770

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.

One thought on “Water Brothers on Ice”

  1. I’ve been meaning to post about this for over 24 hours but it’s so mind-boggling that I become finger-tied. Ice mines. Domed cities across the Martian plain, surrounded by satellite domes in which grow vegetables and grain. Landings become settlements become colonies become an independent nation.

    All are possible now. In a frontispiece to The Making of STAR TREK the late Stephen Whitfield/Stephen Poe called the true name of science fiction “predictive history”. And now we find that the collective vision of a century of writing is in fact able to come to pass.

    I tremble as I write, for the possibilities now open to occur.

    And also: somebody tell Forry before it’s too late, that he was right to believe, and that it will happen.

Comments are closed.