Belen Liotti
(CNN) – The equatorial region of Mars is home to the tallest volcanoes in the solar system, which, in addition to reaching the height of three Mount Everests in some cases, probably hide an unexpected frozen phenomenon, a new study has found.
The largest, Olympus Mons, is 26 kilometers (16 miles) high and a whopping 602 kilometers (374 miles) in diameter, making it about 100 times larger than Earth’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa, in Hawaii. In fact, the entire Hawaiian island chain could fit inside the Martian volcano, according to NASA.
The study’s findings suggest that water can be found almost anywhere on the Red Planet’s surface, said lead author Adomas Valantinas. Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS.
These giants are crowned by large calderas: bowl-shaped depressions caused by the collapse of the volcano’s summit after an intense eruption.
The large size of the calderas – up to 121 kilometers (75 miles) in diameter – creates a special microclimate inside. Using cameras installed on probes orbiting Mars, researchers observed morning frost formation inside the calderas for the first time.
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“Deposits form at the bottom of the caldera, but we also see some frost on the edge. We also confirmed that it is ice and probably water,” said Adomas Valantinas, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University who made the discovery as a doctoral student at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and lead author of the study.
“It is important because it shows us that Mars is a dynamic planet, but also that water can be found almost everywhere on the Martian surface.”
5,000 images
The team of more than two dozen researchers detected frost on four volcanoes: Arsia Mons, Ascraeus Mons and Ceraunius Tholus, as well as Olympus Mons, according to the study published this Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The deposits are extremely thin (just one-hundredth of a millimeter thick, or one-sixth of a human hair, according to Valantinas), but they spread over such a large surface area that they are equivalent to a large amount of water. “By rough estimates, this is about 150,000 metric tons of water ice, the equivalent of 60 Olympic-size swimming pools,” he said.
To observe the deposits, the team first examined about 5,000 images taken by CaSSIS, the Color and Stereo Surface Imaging System at the University of Bern, a high-definition camera that has been photographing Mars since 2018. It is among the instruments on board of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a spacecraft launched in 2016 as a collaboration between the European Space Agency and the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
“This is also the first discovery to come from CaSSIS, which is pretty exciting,” Valantinas said.
The team validated their observations with two other instruments: NOMAD, a spectrometer also on board the Trace Gas Orbiter, and HRSC, or High Resolution Stereo Camera, an older camera on board ESA’s Mars Express orbiter, a spacecraft launched in 2003.
This image of Olympus Mons was obtained early in the morning (7:20 am local solar time) by the stereo camera on board ESA’s Mars Express, as part of new research that reveals for the first time water frosts near of the equator of Mars, a part of the planet where it was believed impossible for frost to exist. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin.
chance find
Valantinas says the discovery came somewhat by chance, because he was originally looking for carbon dioxide frost but found none. The deposits had not been detected until now because they only form early in the morning and in the coldest months, making the observation window narrow.
However, it is unlikely that human astronauts on Mars will one day be able to collect frost. “It would be quite difficult, because although it is a large deposit, it is also very thin and ephemeral, meaning it is only there at night and early in the morning, then it sublimates back into the atmosphere,” Valantinas said.
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The volcanoes are near Mars’ equator, the warmest area on the planet, making a discovery of water particularly intriguing, Valantinas said.
“Mars is a desert planet, but there is water ice in the polar caps and water ice in the mid-latitudes. Now we also have water freezes in the equatorial regions, and the equatorial regions are quite dry in general. So this was quite unexpected,” she said.
Valantinas added that in the past, when Mars had a thicker atmosphere and a different climate, there may have been glaciers on these volcanoes. The team now wants to expand the search for frost to the more than a dozen named volcanoes on Mars.
A remarkable achievement
If humans ever want to explore the Red Planet, we’ll need to know where the water is, so the Martian water cycle is an important field of study, said John Bridges, professor of planetary sciences at the University of Leicester in the United States. who did not participate in the study.
“This paper makes fantastic use of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter’s CaSSIS camera, which provides visible color and infrared light reflected from the Martian surface,” said Bridges, calling the results a “remarkable achievement.”
Additionally, the water cycle on Mars is not as active as it was billions of years ago, making it challenging to measure how water moves around the surface, said J. Taylor Perron, professor of Earth, Atmosphere. and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perron was also not affiliated with the new investigation.
“If it is confirmed that the frost from these volcanoes is water (and not carbon dioxide), it would be surprising,” he said.
The entire surface of Mars is cold and dry, Perron added, but the area around the equator is drier and less cold than the poles, making it one of the last places one would expect to see water ice. It would also raise the question, he concluded, about where the water vapor that forms frost comes from: from volcanoes, even if they are dormant, or from much further away, such as polar ice caps.
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