Mars Hides 'A Fantastic Find' Of Thick Sheets Of Ice Just Below The Surface

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/mars-hides-a-fantastic-find-of-thick-sheets-of-ice-just-below-the-surface-1799072
It is not news that Mars is icy. In 2001, the Mars Odyssey spacecraft
arrived at the planet and began snooping for chemical signatures of ice.
The craft's gamma-ray spectrometer found telltale hydrogen, which indicated
Mars had enormous amounts of ice. As much as a third of the Martian surface
contains shallow ice. But remotely sensing elements such as hydrogen could
not reveal the depth and makeup of the ice.

The newer Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mapped the surface in greater detail.
Dundas and his colleagues used its pictures to locate exposed ice in small
craters, glaciers and ice sheets. "The high-resolution data has greatly
improved our understanding of various ice-related land forms," he said.

These cliffs are "rare peeks into the subsurface of Mars, giving us access
to an undisturbed slice through Mars' ice in the mid-latitudes - a
fantastic find!" said Susan Conway, a planetary scientist at the University
of Nantes in France who was not involved with this research.

Open University's Matt Balme, a planetary scientist in Britain who did not
participate in this study, said the key findings were the color images of a
bluish tint. That indicates a sub-layer that is "somehow compositionally
different" than the red dirt. It is unlikely that the frozen sheets are a
mix of water and soil. "If the conclusions of the paper are correct," he
said, "you're looking at something that's almost pure ice."

It is not news that Mars is icy. In 2001, the Mars Odyssey spacecraft arrived at the planet and began snooping for chemical signatures of ice. The craft's gamma-ray spectrometer found telltale hydrogen, which indicated Mars had enormous amounts of ice. As much as a third of the Martian surface contains shallow ice. But remotely sensing elements such as hydrogen could not reveal the depth and makeup of the ice.
The newer Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mapped the surface in greater detail. Dundas and his colleagues used its pictures to locate exposed ice in small craters, glaciers and ice sheets. "The high-resolution data has greatly improved our understanding of various ice-related land forms," he said.
These cliffs are "rare peeks into the subsurface of Mars, giving us access to an undisturbed slice through Mars' ice in the mid-latitudes - a fantastic find!" said Susan Conway, a planetary scientist at the University of Nantes in France who was not involved with this research.
Open University's Matt Balme, a planetary scientist in Britain who did not participate in this study, said the key findings were the color images of a bluish tint. That indicates a sub-layer that is "somehow compositionally different" than the red dirt. It is unlikely that the frozen sheets are a mix of water and soil. "If the conclusions of the paper are correct," he said, "you're looking at something that's almost pure ice."