Such a discovery could have significant implications for future human exploration on the Red Planet.
"What we've found is not ice, but a salt deposit with the detailed morphologic features of a glacier," Pascal Lee, lead author of the study and a planetary scientist with the SETI and Mars Institutes, said in the statement."What we think happened here is that salt formed on top of a glacier while preserving the shape of the ice below, down to details like crevasse fields and moraine bands.
"Glaciers often present distinctive types of features, including marginal, splaying, and tic-tac-toe crevasse fields, and also thrust moraine bands and foliation," John Schutt, co-author of the study and a geologist at the Mars Institute, said in the statement."We are seeing analogous features in this light-toned deposit, in form, location, and scale. It's very intriguing.
"A relatively young relict glacier in this location tells us that Mars experienced surface ice in recent times, even near the equator, which is new," Lee said in the statement. Although water ice is not stable at the surface of Mars near the equator at these elevations, it is possible that some of the glacier's water ice may be preserved beneath the sulfate salts. Further research is needed to confirm, but if water ice is in fact present at this equatorial region, there's the possibility it could be extracted as a resource for future missions.
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