Mars, the water-rich planet

[james_davis_nicoll]

The experiment reveals that the southern Martian polar region is the largest body of frozen water on the planet and the largest, outside of Earth, in the inner solar system, which includes Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury.

Nicked from mckitterick

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Now we just have to build those canals...

(Ok, atmosphere _first_, canals second)

Bruce

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Which from the PoV of terraforming Mars this is both good and very bad news. If the polar caps were mostly carbon dioxide, then giving Mars an atmosphere that hold both heat and water would involve solar mirrors at the poles, possibly even simpler options. So, while it has lots of water, doing anything useful with it would involve adding lots of atmosphere, and that's a whole lot harder. This info also largely kills off the theories about Mars being periodically hospitable to life, depending upon axial tilt. Given that it still would be near-vacuum if it got much warmer, it sounds to me like it's been dead for several billion years.