The remains of a glacier have been found near the Martian equator, suggesting that some form of water could still exist in a region on the red planet where humans may one day land.
The ice mass is no longer there, but scientists spotted telltale remains among other mineral deposits near Mars' equatorial region. The deposits there usually contain light-colored sulfate salts.
"What we've found is not ice, but a salt deposit with the detailed morphologic features of a glacier," lead study author Dr. Pascal Lee, a senior planetary scientist with the SETI Institute and the Mars Institute, said in a statement. "This region of Mars has a history of volcanic activity. And where some of the volcanic materials came in contact with glacier ice, chemical reactions would have taken place at the boundary between the two to form a hardened layer of sulfate salts," said study coauthor Sourabh Shubham, a doctoral student of geology at the University of Maryland, College Park, in a statement.
The study authors said they think the glacier existed during the Mars Amazonian geologic period, which began 2.9 billion years ago and remains ongoing.
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