Mars has belts of glaciers consisting of frozen water | Hacker News Reader

Mars has belts of glaciers consisting of frozen water

phys.org

64 pointscryptoz17 comments

Is this the first confirmation that there is large amounts of water on Mars? Weren't we unsure there was any significant/useful amount of water just a few years ago?

Yes.

Does anyone know of a good Mars terraformation resource? I'm thinking 50-100 page pdf that would make for an interesting weekend read.

The Mars trilogy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy ) is a bit dated but fun. It's fiction though.

I'm near the end of Green Mars at the moment. It's a fascinating story. I'm never sure if the science is accurate (not my forte) but it's definitely convincing and a compelling read.

Total Recall? Well... the last five minutes.

"Get your ass to Mars."

Closest I know of ...

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/zubrin.htm

I believe Zubrin expands on it a bit in his book ...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Mars-Settle-Planet/dp/0684835...

The fact that there is water on another planet or a meteor seems to attract a lot of media attention. But is it reasonable as it seems almost impossible to retrieve this water for us now? Is there any interest in this fact (as helping to support life)?

(I'm not saying it is not interesting, I just question why it gets more attention than other discoveries).

I think at least some of the interest comes from the possibility of the water supporting _human_ life.

So you could cover the entire surface with 1.1 meters of ice. Does this mean Mars has a higher water-to-surface-area ratio than Earth?

Well let's see, 70% of Earth is already covered in water, and the average depth of that is significantly greater than 1.1 metres. So, no, I don't think Mars has a higher water-to-surface-area ratio than Earth. Not by a long shot :)

Well, surface area has a lot to do with the terrain. If Mars were a perfect sphere (which it's not), then it wouldn't take much water at all to have a high surface area water::land ratio

Yes, I am not sure if they calculated this based on Mars being a perfect sphere or not. I did find this interesting image of all the water on Earth, compared to the size of Earth: http://water.usgs.gov/edu/gallery/global-water-volume.html

What a incredible image! If a picture is worth a thousand words, this one is a very representative one. Very well done. Congratulations to the team.

So if we could cause mars to heat up, would oceans form or would it start to evaporate into space?

It's a lot of energy to make those oceans, on the order of decades of the total solar radiation that Mars receives (my SWAG is over 10 years just to get ice past the melting point). Something like 5E16 KJ, plus whatever you need to warm the ice up to 0C. Of course, this isn't practical.

Once you do that, then, yeah. Water vapor rises, gets slammed by UV radiation and dissociated, and hydrogen goes thataway (not sure what happens to the oxygen, maybe it gets bound up in the soil?). It's pretty much how Mars lost its atmosphere to begin with. Not having a magnetic field is bad for the environment.

I am not an astrophysicist, but my understanding is that melting the ice would cause it to escape into space for at least two reasons:

1) Mars' core has cooled significantly, and it no longer has a powerful magnetic field to protect it from solar winds. Solar winds have the ability to take a polarized molecule like H2O and strip it from the atmosphere. It's also much easier to strip it from Mars because

2) Mars has a gravity of approximately 1/3rd of what Earth has.

Combined, these two factors mean that Mars has an atmosphere that is 0.6% as thick as Earth's.

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