Just discovered a glacier on Mars?

A new study shows that strange circular features on a flat region called Arcadia Planitia on Mars bear a striking resemblance to the ice flows inside the Antarctic ice sheets.

Photos taken on Mars show many features similar to the glaciers in Antarctica. If these covered glaciers do, in fact, exist, they could be a reason to direct future Mars rovers towards this region. This location is inherently attractive to SpaceX and NASA because it is a wide, flat plain that is ideal for landing spacecraft. If there was ice not too deep below the surface, astronauts could also easily have a source of water within reach. Lead researcher Shannon Hibbard, a doctoral student at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, said the newly discovered flow-like features are very strange because they appear on flat terrain. “There’s a lot of evidence that this is an ice-rich area, but we don’t have any confidence that there could be a glacier in places with tortuous features,” said Hibbard. this. They’re existing in a pretty flat plane, so that’s odd.” Mysterious terrain Arcadia Planitia is located in the northern lowlands of Mars. Over the past 3 billion years, lava flows have been active over this area, so it is much less prone to crater cracking than other areas of the planet. Data collected from orbit over many years shows that the ground in the region is rich in hydrogen. Because water is made of hydrogen and oxygen molecules, this hydrogen indicates the presence of ice just below the surface. For decades, scientists have noticed features on Mars that are associated with ice. Along the low hills, there are debris that looks like the flow of a glacier covered in a thin layer of rock. There are also veins in seagulls that look similar to glaciers flowing through valleys on Earth. Similar features also occur in Arcadia Planitia, says Hibbard. Lobate features occur near a set of mountains known as the Montes Erebus that rise from the plain. Images taken from orbit, thermal data showing the surface’s temperature during both day and night, albedo data showing the surface reflectance, dust cover information and altitude data, and topographic. glacial flow The tortuous features are a big mystery because they look like they were created by the flow of ice, but the terrain isn’t steep enough to explain why the ice moves, says Hibbard. “We had to try to figure out what they are, why do they have thermal symbols, why are they so bright all day and night, why do they have flow characteristics, why are they threaded?” she said. Analysis shows that these features are in fact ice-derived. The undulating shapes look similar to other features associated with slow-moving matter found on Mars, Hibbard said, and the data suggests that these spots are indeed rich in ice. The most similar-looking sinusoidal feature, says Hibbard, is the ice flows inside the Earth’s ice sheets, which are mainly found in Antarctica. These faster-moving ice flows are not well understood on Earth, much less Mars, Hibbard says, but they represent an example of ice flowing in fairly flat terrain. This is a controversial claim, says Hibbard, because most of Earth’s ice streams need at least a thin layer of liquid water at their bottoms to lubricate their flow. It’s not clear if water under the ice exists or ever existed on Mars, she said, and it’s not clear whether a wet background is needed to create ice flows on the Red Planet. One possibility could be that in the past, when Mars’ orbit was tilted differently than it is today and its climate was different, sub-glacial melting may have occurred. The study is published in the May issue of the journal Icarus.