
Mars has belts of glaciers consisting of frozen water - cryptoz
http://phys.org/news/2015-04-mars-belts-glaciers-frozen.html
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choppaface
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?

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dredmorbius
Yes.

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

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

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Stoo
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.

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louhike
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).

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

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thret
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?

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jstanley
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
:)

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sjs382
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

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thret
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](http://water.usgs.gov/edu/gallery/global-water-volume.html)

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marcolinux
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.

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

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jxcl
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.

