A group of American and Canadian geophysicists have discovered a huge accumulation of underground ice on Mars, which contains about the same amount of water as Lake Superior, which is the largest and deepest in the Great Lakes system.
Scientists managed to discover a giant deposit of underground ice using the SHARAD radar of the MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) orbital station.
In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters, geophysicists note that a layer of water ice (50-80%), sand and gases is located 1-10 meters below the surface in the west of the Utopia Plain, about halfway from the equator to north pole. The frozen reservoir is 80–170 meters thick and has a volume of 14.3 thousand cubic kilometers.
"The discovered accumulation of underground ice is larger than the area of the state of New Mexico," - said NASA.
"This deposit is likely due to heavy snowfall, which formed an ice sheet, mixing with dust during the formation of Mars, when the planet's axis was tilted differently than it is now," said lead author Cassie Sturman.
Araik Yeghishyan