A new study suggests that in the south Martian pole, there may be a lake buried beneath the ice. Here's what that means
he Mars that was and the Mars that is are two very different things. Three or so billion years ago, the Red Planet was awash with water, as now-dry riverbeds, deltas, and ocean basins reveal. But when the planet lost its magnetic field, it lost its protection from the solar wind, which stripped away much of the planet’s atmosphere and allowed most of its water to escape to space.
One clue to the possible presence of water beneath Mars’s south pole came from the European Space Agency’s orbiter, which conducted radar soundings in 2018 of a region in the ice cap known as Ultimi Scopuli. The scans revealed an area that was highly reflective in a frequency consistent with a large deposit of liquid water. On Earth, such a finding beneath an ice cap would not be at all uncommon.
. During the course of its mission, which lasted from 1997 through 2006, that satellite took the measure of the region using not ground-penetrating radar, but a laser altimeter—and that scan revealed something intriguing. Stretching across a 10 to 15 km expanse of Ultimi Scopuli was a distinct surface undulation—with the ice dipping as low as 4 m below the surrounding terrain and at the other end rising 7 m above it.
The investigators based their findings not on any new sightings taken at Mars, but on computer modeling. Beginning with the data returned by the two satellites, they plugged in multiple variables—including simulations of subsurface friction that would be caused by either solid ice or a body of water; varying depths of the theoretical subsurface lake; and the amount of geothermal heat beneath the surface of Mars in recent geological history.
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