How Much Water is in the Massive Glaciers on Mars

Mars has polar ice caps, but it also has belts of glaciers at its central latitudes at both its northern and southern hemispheres. Now, scientists have calculated the size of these glaciers and the amount of water they hold and have discovered that they have the equivalent of all of Mars being covered by more than one meter of ice.

Several satellites orbit Mars and on satellite images, researchers have been able to observe the shape of glaciers just below the surface. For a long time, scientists did not know if the ice was made of frozen water or of carbon dioxide or whether it was mud.

In order to find out, they used radar measurements from the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). This revealed that the water was indeed ice. However, how thick this ice was remained a mystery.

That's why scientists calculated the thickness of the ice by using radar observations combined with ice flow modelling

"We have looked at radar measurements spanning ten years back in time to see how thick the ice is and how it behaves," said Nanna Bjornholt Karlsson, one of the researchers, in a news release. "A glacier is after all a big chunk of ice and it flows and gets a form that tells us something about how soft it is. We then compared this with how glaciers on Earth behave and from that we have been able to make models for the ice flow."

In the end, the researchers calculated that the ice on the glaciers is equivalent to over 150 billion cubic meters of ice, and that that much ice could cover the entire surface of Mars with 1.1 meters of ice. This means that the glacier ice is an important part of Mars' water reservoir.

The findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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