NASA spacecraft
The driest desert on Earth is 1,000 times drier than Mars, a planet that once flooded with water. On the Martian surface, though, some ice is still slowly flowing.
Is carried by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite that orbits Mars and takes detailed images of the planet’s surface. HiRISE was recently utilized by planetary scientists to capture an image of a “icy flow” that resembled a glacier from 184 miles above the surface of Mars. Not just the icy Martian poles have frozen ice.
According to HiRISE co-investigator and Mars geologist Mike Mellon, “the surface of Mars is littered with examples of glacier-like landforms.” While surface ice deposits are primarily restricted to the polar caps, there are numerous non-polar regions of Mars that exhibit slow, viscous flow patterns.
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The “temperate” zone of Mars around 37 latitude is where the image below was captured.
Mars’s ice flow
The ice is not moving quickly. Inside of valleys and craters, it typically forms on rocky debris.
“As ice flows downhill, rock and soil are plucked from the surrounding landscape and ferried along the flowing ice surface and within the icy subsurface,” explained Mellon. Although it may take thousands of years or more, this process gradually develops a network of linear patterns that show the history of ice flow.
The rock flows persist even after the ice melts or evaporates, leaving behind visible evidence of Mars’ waning but ongoing geologic activity.
This ice, though, is a long cry from Mars’ pre-water days, when lakes covered the planet and streams flowed through river deltas. Currently, NASA’s Perseverance rover is exploring the river delta in the Jezero Crater on Mars in search of any signs of ancient, primitive life that may have once existed there.
