NASA reveal , liquid water lake beneath polar ice cap

a reply to: wildespace

Calm down mate? Your point is? Did I specify evaporation? Was there any mention of atmosphere.....No, we all know this basic stuff. It's just bloody obvious from looking at Mars and it's huge white pole of ice that it's .........wait for it.......Ice!

As it gets warmer (Yes including the ground) Ice will melt, including permafrost / ice whatever that is "underground".

Jeeez mate, thanks for the put down. I didn't mention any of the other stuff because I would have thought that was obvious but next time I'm spell my reasons out (just for you) so you don't think I'm an idiot.

a reply to: CaptainBeno

Actually, it is dry ice (i.e., polar ice caps on Mars is frozen carbon dioxide).

Anyway, earlier this week a paper claimed that the soil on Mars is too dry to support life. When Viking landed, they said, “Life!” Well, that was retracted and they said, “No water. No life!” Then they said, “Well, maybe there was ancient water...”. Then the rovers showed up. Then it was, “Water!! Lakes!!” Then, “No organic molecules. Just mineralization in the presence of water”. Then another 180 when they just announced trace organic materials a few months ago.

Are people that dumb?? Life was found on Mars from our first probe in the 1970’s!!

We are just waiting for the people who are afraid of... well, judging by the threads on the Mud Pit about white people calling the cops on non-whites... everything, they will draw this out until the bitter end just to keep them feeling their safe space! And yeah, “space”!!

a reply to: CaptainBeno
The water in this newly-discovered lake is thought to be at -10 to -30 degrees Celsius. Not that warm at all.

Anyhoo, science is science, and anything, no matter how obvious to some people, has to be detected, analysed, and verified. We haven't seen a single stable body of liquid water on Mars before, so this is an exciting discovery. And this one only became possible due to a new experimental way they started looking at the data, coupled with additional observations, ruling out false positives, and lots of calculations. Which is why I'm sticking up for them and have little patience for people going "duh! it's so obvious, why did it take so long for them to ralise and anounce that?"

A great writeup by Phil Plait (with his usual but welcome dose of scepticism): www.syfy.com...

He points out that the findings are not 100% conclusive, but a layer of liquid water seems to be the best explanation.

For CaptainBeno:

It’s been known for some time that liquid water could exist under the Martian surface. Heat from the Martian interior bubbles up, and warmth from the sunlit surface works its way down. Depending on the thermal gradient (how the temperature changes with depth, which depends on the material), this means that in some places on Mars the temperature allows for water ice to melt. In general, it’s about 1 – 2 kilometers deep.

Years ago it was thought that the SPLD was too thin to have liquid water under it, but then MARSIS mapped the region (called Planum Australe, or southern plains) and showed it’s actually up to 3.7 kilometers thick in places!

a reply to: sapien82

This news really made me so happy when I heard it and was glad to see that someone create the post here.

This is so important, I do not understand why this is not on prime news. It seems that there is some kind of push to not discuss such findings, as to not cause concern to those of both religious beliefs.

I think that NASA have known about this for longer then this, they tested the public recently by saying they found carbon and I can guarantee you that they really wanted to say we found this, huge supply of water.

I hold firmly that its an obvious, we are not alone. If we exist then they exist.

There could be life residing in the depths of mars, just as its been theorised that we once lived underground.

Do we already have contact? Possibly so.

originally posted by: BlackProject
a reply to: sapien82
It seems that there is some kind of push to not discuss such findings, as to not cause concern to those of both religious beliefs.

I think that NASA have known about this for longer then this, they tested the public recently by saying they found carbon and I can guarantee you that they really wanted to say we found this, huge supply of water.

I wonder where people get such ideas from. They're not based on any kind of evidence or even logic.

There's no push not to discuss such findings, there's simply lack of interest on the part of general public and the media.

NASA haven't known about this for longer than this and then decided to slowly trickle the news down to "test" the public. What a load of horseraddish.

The findings are from European Space Agency, not NASA, and they took several years to make sure their findings are correct and well-analysed.

a reply to: sapien82

It all depends on your reasoning.