Immense ice deposits found at south pole of Mars

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A spacecraft orbiting Mars has scanned huge deposits of water ice at its south pole so plentiful they would blanket the planet in 36 feet of water if they were liquid, scientists said on Thursday.

The scientists used a joint NASA-Italian Space Agency radar instrument on the European Space Agency Mars Express spacecraft to gauge the thickness and volume of ice deposits at the Martian south pole covering an area larger than Texas.

The deposits, up to 2.3 miles thick, are under a polar cap of white frozen carbon dioxide and water, and appear to be composed of at least 90 percent frozen water, with dust mixed in, according to findings published in the journal Science.

Scientists have known that water exists in frozen form at the Martian poles, but this research produced the most accurate measurements of just how much there is.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070315/ts_nm/mars_water_dc

It's just a matter of time.

(darn! did I just give away another brilliant million-dollar idea?!?!)

People drinking it suddenly develop weird symptoms from Martian microbes!

.

Take that back, or they will have to use their mind control rays on you!

For thrillseekers, y'know.

"Be the FIRST on your planet to catch the newest, deadliest plague!"

Thus making the men pine for their dotage.

When the earth is toast krispy.

:)

of course, they might just use robots eventually

poor and desperate. The ruling classes never immigrate. They don't have to. They can afford to maintain their way of life regardless of reality, and they have no incentive to leave.

But Earth will be a poorer place for it. The brightest and best who realize that the only way to preserve humanity is to have Off Site Backup will be the ones doing the off site backuping and leave. The slow, the complacent, the oblivious and the controlling won't go, (and of course there will be an opportunity gap, unless someone figures out that there's a lot of space for either Botany Bays or work camps...) and Earth will show a brain drain... which will end up making all of the problems worse, since those smart enough to get out will, and the rest ...

Besides... ya know how hard it is to remodel a bathroom or a kitchen when you have to live around the remodel? That's kind of what we have going on here on earth. We need to kind of clear off the planet for a couple hundred years and let the contractors fix the "sinks" and "HVAC". Or at least, spend a couple centuries living really lightly and around the atmosphere and oceans.

there is likely to be (to have been) life, which will add one more giant step away from our Earth centric view of the universe.

Lets GTF outa here.

What a wonderful day that will be. :)

Curious to see how they'd take it.

There will be one less crevice for the god of the gaps to hide in. ;)

Then he'd really launch a war on Terra.

;)

(But I'm sure there's a Terra/"Gone With The Wind" joke in there somewhere.)

a liquid water zone deep underground at the ice/rock interface due to heat generated by friction and latent background heat from the core. Sounds really exiting! Could you imaging filling the great canyon with this water? Zow!

that totally shocked everyone b/c there was an entire ecosystem of life in a zero-sunlight environment. Just hot water. I wouldn't be surprised, either. Also think of Europa, caught in the huge tidal forces of Jupiter. Definitely liquid water there too.

I KNEW they would eventually find it!! :bounce:

Now: how could we melt this? Mirrors?

A billion Bics?

:D

pretty soon you'll have global warming, just like here, and it will all melt. We seem to be particularly good at this talent.

As in the Schwarzenegger movie... but real.
Blow megatons of CO2 into the atmosphere which would warm the planet up, melt the ice, allow plants to thrive that produce oxygene.

If this were melted and released, an atmosphere could form which would trap the heat from the sun and unlock the moisture trapped as ice. I also understand that the soil is comprised of a fair amount of iron oxide and iron superoxide which would react with the newly released water vapors to release its stored O2. I'm thinking a few well placed thermonuclear devices might facilitate this. I can think of no other energy source currently available to us that can generate the necessary heat and energy to initiate the process.

Let's nuke 'em over there so we don't have to nuke 'em over here.

Let us share water.

My first thought was Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land...

The civilians will riot if they don't get a hot shower every day.

"...solving the problem once and for all."

"but --"

"ONCE AND FOR ALL!"

Before he gets all mad.