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Mars Ice Deposit Holds as Much Water as Lake Superior
- Ftuuky 10y agoGood spot to land the Spacex's ITV.
- techterrier 10y agoOr mud, as this stuff otherwise known.
- peeters 10y agoGiven the temperature and pressure of Mars' atmosphere, "permafrost" might be a better comparison.
- stcredzero 10y agoThere is a sentence that seems to imply that the frozen status implies there is no life. I'm not so sure we can be sure of that. There are microbes on Earth that basically live in virtually frozen environments. (All you need are moments when the water is liquid.)
- Practicality 10y agoYou could even just have life that moves more slowly because of the lower available energies. If we ever find some life that does not have an Earth origin perhaps we can finally get some more data points about what environments are really required for life.
- Animats 10y agoAll you need are moments when the water is liquid. But you don't get those at such low atmospheric pressure. Mars atmospheric pressure is around 600pa. Below 611pa, the boiling point of water drops to the freezing point; you can have ice or steam, but not liquid water.
- stcredzero 10y agoBut you don't get those at such low atmospheric pressure. Mars atmospheric pressure is around 600pa. A mental exercise: Any place on Mars with higher than 600pa pressure?
- qbrass 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellas_Planitia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellas_Planitia
- stcredzero 10y agoHow about underground? How about the bottom of a glacier? No need to be "surfacist." ;)
- qbrass 10y agoAn unsealed hole underground would have to be dug to the same depths as that crater. If you're pressurizing it, you'll probably target 1 bar to live in it, instead of 600 KPa. A glacier that has the pressure to melt ice, would have more than enough pressure to keep it from sublimating. A rough estimate says that a foot or so of ice could provide over 600KPa of pressure, but that doesn't account for any means of keeping the water liquid or the ice solid. However, I wouldn't expect to actually find that on Mars. You might be able to keep water that way for a while until it froze again.
- hermitdev 10y agoThey do have recent satellite images that appear to show signs of water running down ravines at certain times of the Mara year. Don't have a citation handy, though.
- smcnally 10y agoThat explanation is sublime.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Practicality 10y agoYou're going to be hard pressed to out pedantic NASA scientists. They probably spent quite some time deliberating over the term "Ice Deposit" as the most accurate one.
- tempymctempface 10y agoyou're this smug about an article describing a huge water deposit on mars? I'd hate to get your opinion on something more mundane
- InclinedPlane 10y agoIt is not mud. Firstly it is not liquid, it's frozen. Secondly, it's not permafrost where it's mixed with a considerable amount of dirt, it's ice, a sub-surface glacier, one of many on Mars, merely the largest one we've discovered so far.
- ginko 10y agoWhich is about a millionth of the total water on Earth.
- alexhawdon 10y agoFrom TFA: "It represents less than one percent of all known water ice on Mars..."
- ianai 10y agoNow I think it's a good idea to colonize the place.
- mimimimi 10y agoThis should be enough for a colony though. With a recycling program it would probably last indefinitely. Much better than bringing the water from Earth.
- jonsen 10y agoJust bring the right kind of people and God will flood it.
- mimimimi 10y agoYou actually made me laugh. I immediately thought of Trump. With global warming and his disbelief in it I think we are heading unto our own flood.
- bonzini 10y agoJust the two little problems with the magnetic field and atmosphere left to solve.
- jononor 10y agoRecyling could mean never letting it out into the atmosphere in the first place. Or maybe would, since there is no water cycle to talk of on Mars. Think closed-loop aquaponics systems etc.
- 557833 10y agoLake Superior has enough water to flood all of North and South America to almost one foot.
- giarc 10y agoWas intrigued by this comment so I looked it up. North and South America have a surface area of about 42.55 million sq km or 4.58x10^14 sq ft (1 foot deep water is obviously 4.58x10^14 cubic feet). Lake Superior has a volume of 12,100 cubic km or 4.2x10^14 cubic feet. That's unbelievable!
- dekhn 10y agonow do the calculations on lake baikal.
- bryondowd 10y agoAbout 8.12x10^14 cubic feet, so about 1.77 feet spread over all of the Americas.
- motoboi 10y agoWhat about Guarani Aquifer?
- brownbat 10y agoA little over 3 feet. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(40,000+cubic+kilometres+%2F+42.55+million+sq+km)+in+feet http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(40,000+cubic+kilometre... To skip ahead, the Great Artesian Basin, the largest artesian basin in the world, would be just over 5 feet. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(64,900+cubic+kilometres+%2F+(area+of+north+america+%2B+area+of+south+america))+in+feet http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(64,900+cubic+kilometre... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Artesian_Basin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Artesian_Basin
- droopyEyelids 10y ago
- verytrivial 10y agoWater behaves very strangely on Mars. http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/2753.htm http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/2753.htm -- Note the videos.
- mozumder 10y agoThe entire core of Mars is made out of ice. The reactor melts it, and it makes air.
- flippyhead 10y agoWhy this excellent movie reference is down voted, I know not.
- reddytowns 10y agoGod, I hope one day the act of regurgitating the script from a vaguely relevant, fictional work is no longer celebrated.
- bache 10y agoTotal Recall kicks ass
- balabaster 10y agoQuick, someone sell the water rights to Nestle for pennies on the dollar and let private industry extract it so that we can avoid paying taxes to get it ourselves and have it sold to us for a premium! Edit: Sorry, forgot my sarcasm tag </sarcasm> Edit2: Apologies if my humour isn't productive, sometimes I just can't help myself, lol
- codecamper 10y agoIf we could just pack up some of this extra CO2 & get it over there, maybe we'd have a new planet! I wonder how many PPM you'd need?
- pasbesoin 10y agoYeah, but how are we going to reheat and spin up the core?
- sandebert 10y agoCan't we just let the market handle that?
- tonyedgecombe 10y agoVery funny.
- anigbrowl 10y agoHave you tried turning it off and on again /ducks to avoid projectiles
- pasbesoin 10y agoI've progressed to the eternal struggle between pounding on it with my fist and utter apathy. Apathy is on its way to winning. (Don't tell Jen.)
- pasbesoin 10y agoHmm. Downvotes. Isn't this the next step after turning it off and on again. Back when we had more mechanical drives, daughterboards, socketed chips and the like, it worked a surprising amount of the time. Apathy... Maybe that comes with age. P.S. Not to mention tubes. Yeah, I'm that old. P.P.S The grandparent was making a reference to a show, and Jen is a character in that show. In case that was confusing anyone.
- fatdog 10y agoKing of Mars. Called it.
- Practicality 10y agoInteresting that this is in the "Utopia Planitia." That is starting to look like a probable location to set up a colony.
- baron816 10y agoMars is still less habitable than the Earth would be post nuclear war.
- Nomentatus 10y agoThere are places on Mars where water ice is available year-round, and carbon dioxide ice seasonally, at high latitudes. Therefore, I'd say this discovery, at low latitudes, has few implications for colonization unless there's a fair bit of carbon dioxide ice mixed in. So I'm waiting for word on that before getting too excited.