14 DAY TRIAL // With the help of radar observations delivered by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute gained new insights into the hidden anatomy of the Red Planet.
Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists explain that, according to data at hand, it's not just Mars' polar caps that hold massive amounts of ice.
On the contrary, it appears that the Red Planet also has massive belts of water ice encircling its silhouette at its central latitudes in the southern and northern hemisphere, as illustrated in the image below.
These glaciers cannot be observed directly because they are hidden under a thick layer of ice. However, the Niels Bohr Institute scientists say that they are pretty impressive size-wise.
Thus, these water ice belts around the central latitudes of both of Mars' hemispheres are estimated to have an overall volume of over 150 billion cubic meters (approximately 5,297 billion cubic feet).
Just to put things into perspective, the scientists behind this investigation explain that this much ice would be enough to coat the entire planet in a layer of ice measuring about 1.1 meters (3.6 feet) in thickness.
“The ice at the mid-latitudes is therefore an important part of Mars’ water reservoir,” researcher Nanna Bjørnholt Karlsson told the press in an interview.
It is believed that the reason these hidden glaciers have survived over the millennia is precisely because they are buried under a thick layer of dust that has kept them from evaporating.
