New Study Suggests Mars Glaciers Could Be Almost Entirely Water Ice

A new study suggests that some Martian glaciers may contain much higher quantities of water ice than previously thought. Although previous studies have postulated that the Red Planet’s glaciers may be made primarily of rock, researchers now believe they could contain upwards of 80% ice water. If their work is accurate, the glaciers could hold serious potential for future use by Mars settlers as components for fuel, air, and drinking water.

One of the greatest challenges for any potential future manned mission to Mars—and eventually, a settlement—is providing enough resources for such frontier explorers. Shipping liquid water to Mars would be prohibitively expensive, but generating it on site holds much more promise. With such pure ice glaciers, future Mars visitors would have the potential to create much of what they need on site.

Although Martian glaciers have been within sight of Earthbound scientists for hundreds of years, they’ve often been discredited as water sources; their dust-covered surfaces suggested they were mostly made up of rock, with a meager 30% ice water content. But a new study leveraging the shallow radar instrument (SHARAD) on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggests that the glacier’s water content is far higher than once believed.

“We found a surprising consistency in the purity of these glaciers,” study co-author Oded Aharonson, a professor of planetary science at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science and a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, told Space.com. “We found all the sites we looked at can be described as relatively pure ice deposits, maybe 80% or more ice, under a rock or dust cover. They could be a resource in the future if humanity tried to access them.”

The study looked at the way radar interacted with glaciers to make an estimation on their contents.
Credit: Icarus Study/Elsevier

The study used the SHARAD radar to investigate how radar waves transited through the glacial material and how energy dissipated from those waves. The difference in dissipation gives researchers a deeper insight into the composition of these glaciers.

Measures glaciers were entire hemispheres apart, too, suggesting that this isn’t some localised effect. That’s also good news, because it means that future explorers won’t need to land near any one particular glacier to benefit from its potential.

Researchers’ next step is to explore further glaciers to see if this pattern holds. If it does, the number of potential landing sites for the first astronauts and settlers on Mars could expand dramatically.

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