Glaciers On Mars Are Mostly Water Ice, Study Finds

New findings suggest that glaciers on Mars are composed of more than 80 per cent pure water ice, with some estimates suggesting they are nearly pure ice. This high purity level is consistent across different glaciers and hemispheres.

While exploring the Martian surface, scientists have mostly seen glaciers coated in dust on the slopes of the mountains of Mars. Existing studies have suggested that the glaciers were comprised mostly of rock and around 30% ice, or debris-covered glaciers that were more than 80% ice.

The latest discovery, recently published in the journal Science Direct, is crucial for future human missions to Mars, as accessing clean water ice could provide a reliable source of water, oxygen and rocket fuel. Extracting water from pure ice would be more energy-efficient than extracting it from dirty ice.

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"Different techniques had been applied by researchers to various sites, and the results could not be easily compared," study co-author Isaac Smith said in a statement.

Mr Smith is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona and an associate professor of Earth and space science at York University in Toronto.

The uniformity of the glaciers suggests that Mars experienced either a single, planet-wide glaciation event or multiple glaciations with similar properties.

As per the study, the ice is preserved beneath a thin layer of debris, which insulates it from the planet's harsh conditions.

Scientists used the SHAllow RADar (SHARAD) instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to study the glaciers. By measuring the speed and loss of radar waves, they determined the ratio of ice to rock within the glaciers.

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"We found a surprising consistency in the purity of these glaciers," study co-author Oded Aharonson, a professor of planetary science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, told Space.com.

"We found all the sites we looked at can be described as relatively pure ice deposits, maybe 80% or more ice, under a rock or dust cover. They could be a resource in the future if humanity tried to access them."

"The ice may have formed through atmospheric precipitation - snowfall that led to glacial formation," Aharonson said.

"Or it may have formed through direct condensation - glacial formation directly on the ground via the growth of frost," he added.

"It doesn't seem like it would have formed through pore ice formation - when water vapour from the atmosphere diffuses to the subsurface and forms ground ice, which we know happens on Mars and terrestrial settings such as Alaska and Antarctica. If the ice in these glaciers had grown that way, we'd expect much higher levels of impurities, and that's not what we see."