Just discovered glaciers on Mars?

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

Photographs taken on Mars show many glaciers-like features in Antarctica, If these covered glaciers do, in fact, exist, they could be a reason to direct future crews to Mars towards this area. The location was inherently attractive to SpaceX and NASA because it was a wide, flat plain, ideal for landing spacecraft. If there is ice that is not too deep below the surface, the astronauts can also easily have water within reach. Lead researcher Shannon Hibbard, a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, said the newly discovered flow-like characteristics are very strange because they appear on flat terrain. “There is a lot of evidence that this is an area with a lot of ice, but we don’t have any confidence that there could be a glacier in places with winding features,” Hibbard said. this. They exist in a fairly flat plane, so that’s weird. ” Mysterious terrain Arcadia Planitia is located in the lowlands north of Mars. In the past 3 billion years, lava flows have been active in this area, so it is much less prone to cracking with craters than in other areas on the planet. Data collected from orbit over many years show that the ground in the area is rich in hydrogen. Because water is made up of molecules of hydrogen and oxygen, this hydrogen shows the presence of ice just below the surface. For decades, scientists have found features on Mars to be related to ice. Along the low hills, there are debris that look like a glacier flow covered in a thin layer of rock. There are also patterns in gulls that look similar to glaciers that flow through valleys on Earth. Similar features occur in Arcadia Planitia, Hibbard said. Lobate features occur near a set of mountains called Montes Erebus that rise up from the plain. Orbital images, thermal data showing surface temperature during day and night, albedo data showing surface reflectivity, dust cover information and altitude data, and topographic. Glacial flow The winding features are a big mystery, Hibbard says, because they look like they were created by the flow of ice, but the topography is not steep enough to explain why the meteor was moving. “We had to try to figure out what they are, why they have thermal symbols, why they are so bright day and night, why they have flow characteristics, why Are they threaded again? ”she said. The analysis showed that these traits were in fact derived from ice. The curled shapes look similar to other features related to slow-flowing matter seen on Mars, Hibbard said, and the data shows these points actually contain a lot of ice. The most similar sinusoidal feature, Hibbard says, is the currents inside the Earth’s ice sheets, which mainly occur in Antarctica. These faster moving ice currents are not well understood on Earth, much less than Mars, but they do show an example of ice flowing in fairly flat terrain, Hibbard says. This is a controversial claim, Hibbard says, because most ice currents on Earth need at least a thin layer of liquid water at their bottom to lubricate their flow. It is unclear whether sub-ice water existed or existed on Mars, she said, and it is not clear if a wet background is needed to create ice currents on the Red Planet. One possibility might be that in the past, when Mars’ orbit was tilted differently than it is today and its climate was different, melting under ice may have occurred. This research was published in the May issue of the journal Icarus.