Bizzare Mars Crater Reveals Huge Slab Of Ice Closer To Surface Than Any Seen Before

"Scientists have finally solved the mystery of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s puzzling discovery of a perfect, terraced, gigantic crater. And it’s better than ‘aliens’. For humans have just discovered water ice at much shallower depths than previously thought.

It all started with the MRO’s finding of a crater that was too bizarrely shaped. A meteor impact normally results in debris flying out in different directions. Not the case here; the crater was perfectly terraced and the size of California and Texas combined.

But terraced craters the size of two US states are quite rare. And this area of Mars – the Arcadia Planitia – is pock-marked with the peculiar terrace-shaped plugholes. “The craters may have formed at different times, but they all have terraces, which indicates something weird is going on in the subsurface,” Shane Byrne, associate professor at LPL, said.

Surprisingly, this particular crater revealed lots of ice, just beneath Mars’s thin upper crust of dirt. We of course already know that water and ice had to be present on the planet at some point. But not at such depths, and at such mid-latitudes, comparable to Earth’s."

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