Underground volcanoes on Mars ‘are warming a hidden lake under the ice’
Unseen mysteries could be lurking beneath the surface of the Red Planet as scientists suggest that hidden volcanoes may be warming an underground lake on Mars.
Radar readings published last year suggests that liquid water lurks beneath the south polar ice cap on Mars.
Now researchers say that if there’s liquid water, there must have been recent volcanic activity to keep the water warm.
The researchers suggest that a magma chamber must have formed within the past few hundred thousand years for there to be enough heat to produce liquid water underneath the mile-thick ice cap.
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Mars has two giant ice sheets at its poles, both more than a mile thick.
On Earth, it is common for liquid water to be present underneath thick ice sheets, with the planet’s heat causing the ice to melt where it meets the Earth’s crust.
Last year, radar observations detected evidence of liquid water at the base of Mars’s south polar ice cap – but did not address how the liquid water could have got there, in Mars’s much cooler environment.
Michael Sori of the University of Arizona said, ‘We thought there was a lot of room to figure out if [the liquid water] is real, what sort of environment would you need to melt the ice in the first place, what sort of temperatures would you need, what sort of geological process would you need? Because under normal conditions, it should be too cold.’
The researchers performed physical modeling of Mars to understand how much heat is coming out of the interior of the planet and if there could be enough salt at the base of the ice cap to melt the ice.
Salt lowers the melting point of ice significantly so it was thought that salt could have led to melting at the base of the ice cap.
