• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Water Ice Found Unexpectedly On Highest Volcanos In The Solar System

June 10, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Planetary scientists have discovered something truly unexpected happening above Mars’s highest peaks. The volcanos from the Tharsis region there show traces of frost, but it’s not frozen carbon dioxide like elsewhere on Mars. This frost is actually water ice.  

Advertisement

Mars has a thin atmosphere made of mostly carbon dioxide, and these extinct volcanos rise through a large chunk of it. The biggest is Olympus Mons, which is a shield volcano 600 kilometers (370 miles) in diameter, about the size of the entire state of Arizona. Depending on how you measure its altitude, it sits at around 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) high, between 2.5 and three times Earth’s highest mountain, Mt. Everest (which we have all been pronouncing wrong).

Advertisement

The other volcanoes, Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons, all sit between 14 and 18 kilometers in height. The volcanos’ caldera are caved in creating a place for frost to condense, a unique microclimate that allows the condensation of water ice even at the low latitude of the volcanos. The altitude was not expected to play a role in allowing for frost to form since the Martian atmosphere is so thin.

“We thought it was impossible for frost to form around Mars’s equator, as the mix of sunshine and thin atmosphere keeps temperatures relatively high at both surface and mountaintop – unlike what we see on Earth, where you might expect to see frosty peaks,” lead author Adomas Valantinas, who made the discovery as a PhD student at University of Bern and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University, said in a statement sent to IFLScience. 

“Its existence here is exciting, and hints that there are exceptional processes at play that are allowing frost to form.”

Image of the cladera floor of Olmpus Mons, the volcano on Mars, tinted in blue to show where the frost forms onthe caldera floor

High res image by CaSSIS showing the bluish frost on the caldera floor and northern rim of Olympus Mons. The image is around 4.5 km per pixel and 40 km wide.

Image credit: Adomas Valantinas

For several years, researchers have studied a water ice cloud forming from Arsia Mons during the Martian spring. Now, it appears that there more water events happening there. The volcanos seem to focalize the little moisture present in the Martian atmosphere into an area at the top where the conditions are just right for the ice to condense.

Advertisement

“Winds travel up the slopes of the mountains, bringing relatively moist air from near the surface up to higher altitudes, where it condenses and settles as frost,” added co-author Nicolas Thomas, Principal Investigator of Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) on Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), the crucial instrument to this discovery. 

 “We actually see this happening on Earth and other parts of Mars, with the same phenomenon causing the seasonal martian Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud. The frost we see atop Mars’s volcanos appears to settle in the shadowed regions of the calderas especially, where temperatures are colder.”



3D model of Arsia Mons’ caldera and the frost deposits in blue. 

These volcanoes are not just the tallest one in the whole Solar System but they are also extremely well studied. So why was this not seen before?

Advertisement

“There are a few reasons: firstly, we need an orbit that lets us observe a location in the early morning. While ESA’s two Mars orbiters – Mars Express and TGO  – have such orbits and can observe at all times of day, many from other agencies are instead synchronised to the Sun and can only observe in the afternoon,” explained Valantinas. 

“Secondly, frost deposition is linked to colder martian seasons, making the window for spotting it even narrower. In short, we have to know where and when to look for ephemeral frost. We happened to be looking for it near the equator for some other research, but didn’t expect to see it on Mars’s volcano tops!”

This disocvery adds some important knowledge to what we we know and expect about water on Mars, and will be important in the future exploration of both robots and humans.

The study is published in Nature Geoscience.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Motor racing-Love it or hate it, Formula One returns to Dutch shores
  2. Commerzbank to appoint new board members from Erste and Roland Berger – Handelsblatt
  3. Are You A COVID “Super-Dodger?” Then Scientists Want To Hear From You
  4. Scientists Used Underground Nuclear Explosions To Study The Earth’s Core

Source Link: Water Ice Found Unexpectedly On Highest Volcanos In The Solar System

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version