A huge frozen ocean of water has been discovered buried deep beneath the surface of Mars.
The Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF) near the equator of the Red Planet has been known for years to be home to buried ice, but new data gathered by ESA's Mars Express orbiter has revealed this ice may be much more plentiful than we first thought, stretching several miles deep.
If all the ice was brought to the surface of Mars and melted, it would be enough to coat the entire planet with an ocean between 5 and 9 feet deep, according to a new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters revealing the discovery.
That's enough water to fill the Red Sea on Earth and marks the largest deposit of water ice found on Mars, outside of the poles.
Ice was first suspected to be buried deep beneath the MFF in 2007, stretching around 1.6 miles beneath the surface, but scientists couldn't be sure that it was water ice and not sediments of dust or ash. Now, this data confirms that the deposits are likely indeed ice, and go as deep as 2.3 miles.
"This radar sounder study of the Medusae Fossae Formation reveals the presence of layering in all the MFF deposits, layering that is similar to that found in polar layered deposits that are known to be ice rich," Thomas Watters, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution, and author of the paper and the original research in 2007, told Newsweek. "Using more recent MARSIS sounder data, new estimates of the maximum thickness of the MFF deposits have been made. We now estimate them to be as thick as 3700 m, along with new compaction models allow any viable porous ice-free sedimentary or volcanic material to be ruled out. We also determined a new estimate of the dust component of the MFF deposits."
The Medusae Fossae Formation is a section of Mars' surface consisting of billion-year-old wind-sculpted features and huge dust deposits, stretching over 3,000 miles along the planet's equator, bounding the cratered highlands of the south and the lowlands of the northern hemisphere.
"The MFF deposits likely formed during periods of high obliquity when the equator of Mars was much colder than at present. Mars may have spent much more time at states of high obliquity resulting in dramatic shifts in the Martian climate," Watters said. "So, a significant volume [of] water that had been trapped at the Martian poles was redistributed to the equator during these periods of high obliquity."
"No other geologic material without pore fulling water ice can account for the inferred low density and electrical properties. Also, to the radar, the MFF deposits look pretty much the same as the ice rich polar layered deposits," he said.
These icy deposits aren't anything like the glaciers here on Earth, however, as they are heavily contaminated with Mars dust and topped with a crust of rock and ash that is hundreds of feet deep.
This ice is hoped to reveal more about the secrets of Mars' past, which is thought to have once been rich in water.
"This latest analysis challenges our understanding of the Medusae Fossae Formation, and raises as many questions as answers," Colin Wilson, an ESA project scientist for Mars Express and the ESA ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) said in the statement. "How long ago did these ice deposits form, and what was Mars-like at that time? If confirmed to be water ice, these massive deposits would change our understanding of Mars' climate history. Any reservoir of ancient water would be a fascinating target for human or robotic exploration."
This discovery could even be tapped into by future astronauts, as liquid water would be essential to Mars missions.
"If this is ice, it would represent the most substantial low-latitude ice ever detected on Mars. From a human mission perspective, ice represents a valuable resource for life support and to generate fuel for the return trip home," paper co-author Gareth A. Morgan, a Planetary Science Institute senior scientist, said in a Planetary Science Institute statement.
"Low latitudes are also very desirable for multiple reasons, the most important being temperature and solar energy due to the relatively high Sun angles. However, the potential ice deposits are buried under hundreds of meters of dry material and would be very difficult to extract."
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Update 1/22/24, 12:09 p.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Thomas Watters.
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