Beneath Canyons on Mars, Astronomers Find Potentially ‘Water-Rich Area the Size of the Netherlands’

[beecee]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/astronomers-discover-hidden-water-in-the-red-planets-grand-canyon-180979267/

A Martian orbiter located a large reserve of hydrogen in a mountainous area of the Red Planet

Elizabeth Gamillo

Daily Correspondent

December 20, 2021 3:28 p.m.

A region within Mars's Valles Marineris (pictured) called the Candor Chaos had a large amount of hydrogen about a meter below the surface. European Space Agency

extract:

 

"Using TGO's data from May 2018 to February 2021, the team found a large amount of hydrogen beneath the surface of Mars' version of the Grand Canyon, called Candor Chaos. If all of that hydrogen is bound into water molecules, a subsurface region about the size of the Netherlands could be about 40 percent water, explains the study's lead author Igor Mitrofanov of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who is principal investigator of FREND, in a statement. 

"We found a central part of Valles Marineris to be packed full of water — far more water than we expected," Malakhov said in a statement. "This is very much like Earth's permafrost regions, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures."

The water, however, does not appear as abundant liquid lakes found on Earth. Instead, scientists suspect the Martian dust is riddled with ice or water bonded to minerals, CNN's Ashley Strickland reports. Minerals in this region, however, are not know to contain much water. While ice may seem more likely based on what researchers know about other potential sources of hydrogen on Mars, the temperatures and pressure conditions in the Valles Marineris, situated just below the Martian equator, prohibit the formation of these types of water preserves, Science Alert reports."

 

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Edited December 21, 2021 by beecee