Buried glaciers on Mars have enough water to cover entire planet: study

Glaciers hidden under Mars' surface dust may have surprisingly lots of water that is enough to cover the entire planet, new research has found.

Mars has distinct polar ice caps, but Mars also has belts of glaciers buried at its central latitudes in both the southern and northern hemispheres, according to the research published in the U. S. journal Geophysical Research Letters.

As a thick layer of dust covers the glaciers, they look like the surface of the ground. Radar measurements from the U.S. satellite, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, have shown the ice was made of frozen water.

Now, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen calculated the size of the glaciers and thus the amount of water in the glaciers using radar observations combined with ice flow modeling.

"We have calculated that the ice in the glaciers is equivalent to over 150 billion cubic meters of ice -- that much ice could cover the entire surface of Mars with 1.1 meters of ice," lead author Nanna Bjornholt Karlsson, a postdoc at the Center for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute, said in a statement.

Therefore, the ice is "an important part of Mars' water reservoir," she added.

The glaciers are located in belts around Mars between the latitudes 30 degrees and 50 degrees on both the northern and southern hemispheres. The researchers believed that the thick layer of dust is protecting the ice from evaporating into space.