Huge Water Reserves Found All Over Mars

At sites across the middle of Mars, scientists have found layers of water ice buried mere feet below the crimson planet’s surface. The discovery adds extremely important facts to Mars’s geologic history, and it could shape how human beings who probably in time to come to live on Mars will get their water.
This is a new channel into ground ice on Mars," says Colin Dundas, the U.S. Geological Survey geologist who co-located the ice layers.

Scientists have long speculated that reserves of water ice are beneath the ground on Mars. In 2002, the NASA Odyssey challenge scanned the planet from orbit and detected trace of shallow floor ice at high latitudes. In 2008, the NASA Phoenix task dug up water ice at its touchdown locus close to the Martian North Pole.
In late 2016, scientists the use of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) discovered a buried ice spread at Mars’s mid-latitudes that holds approximately as lots water as Lake Superior. However until Dundas’s study, posted in Science, scientists struggled to recognize the quantity and accessibility of Mars’s subsurface ice layers.

The peculiarity in the sites within the new examine encompass steep banks where, just like reducing right into a cake, erosion has uncovered layers of rock and ice that MRO ought to see from overhead. The bands of ice first appear between 3 and 6 feet underground, assisting the belief that Mars’s mid-latitudes periodically noticed big snowfalls hundreds of thousands of years in the past, while Mars turned into tilted on its axis at a steeper angle than it is today, says Dundas.

source:Nat Geo site