Mars has about the same amount of water under the cracked flat area as Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes, a team at the University of Texas at Austin determined using data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Scientists have explored part of the Utopia Plain, a region of Mars located in northern latitudes, using the Shallow Radar instrument mounted on the probe. Analysis of data from more than 600 air passages revealed a layer of frozen water below the surface. It turned out that the thickness of the layer varies in thickness from 80 to 170 meters, and it consists of 50 to 85 percent of water ice mixed with dust or large rock particles.
It is believed that at the latitude of this plain, about halfway from the equator to the pole, water ice cannot persist on the surface of Mars. It turns into water vapor and disappears into the thin, dry atmosphere of the planet. However, in this case, the ice layer is protected from the atmosphere by soil cover, the thickness of which, according to preliminary estimates, ranges from 1 to 10 meters.
“This layer probably formed as snow accumulated in an ice layer mixed with dust, and this happened at a certain period in the history of Mars, when the axis of the planet was tilted more than today,” said Cassie Stuurman of the University of Texas, author of a report on this a topic published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Thus, the Plains of Utopia, or, as they are also called, the 'Plains of Paradise', are an invaluable new source of data for scientists. The new study showed that the location of the ice covers latitudes of 39 to 49 degrees within the plain. This represents less than 1 percent of all known ice deposits on Mars, but more than double the volume of thick, buried ice sheets found in the northern plains. It is noteworthy that according to the Martian programs of the future, the glaciers located in the immediate vicinity of the surface are planned to be used as a necessary resource for the colonizers.
