It Seems Earth is One of the Only Places Running Out of Freshwater

April 8, 2015

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April 8, 2015 – Water seems to be in the science headlines these days. We have NASA forecasting that California will be out of freshwater in a year while at the same time scientists report on the discovery of massive amounts of water in the form of extensive subsurface glaciers on Mars. What an interesting juxtaposition. The planet which is mostly ocean is having freshwater crises while Earth scientists are finding evidence of water almost everywhere it seems in the Solar System.

The latest from Mars comes from studies of satellite data by researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute. Their report entitled, Volume of Martian mid-latitude glaciers from radar observations and ice-flow modelling appears in this month’s Geophysical Research Letters.

The scientists have identified numerous glaciers and ice deposits in the mid-latitutdes of Mars lying just under the surface of the planet. The volume if laid on the surface of Mars would be a layer of ice 1.1 meters (about 3.5 feet) thick. That is a substantial amount of water and doesn’t take into consideration the water bound up in the two Martian polar ice caps. Scientists have wondered where the water on Mars went and it appears a lot of it remains just beneath the planet’s surface.

The image below indicates where the belts of glaciers were discovered, the area where the blue dots appear. The ice is covered by a thick layer of dust but from studying satellite images and radar measurements the scientists at Niels Bohr have been able to not only determine the extent but also the composition of these buried frozen blocks. The fact that they are water and not dry ice is rather compelling. And despite the thin atmosphere of Mars, because the ice is buried under layers of Martian dust, it has not evaporated.

Makes you wonder because where there’s water here on Earth there is life. Could that be the same for Mars?

But Mars’ water is just a drop compared to what NASA has discovered in the outer planets and moons of our Solar System. Ceres, the dwarf planet currently being visited by the robotic spacecraft Dawn, is just one of a number of orbs that contains enormous amounts of water ice. Ganymede, Europa and Callisto, three of the moons of Jupiter, all show strong evidence of subsurface oceans. And two of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus and Titan, are also harboring subsurface volumes of free flowing water sandwiched between layers of ice. An even more recent discovery is permanent signs of water ice in deep craters near the poles of Mercury as well as our Moon. Scientists are also beginning to believe that Jupiter may harbor significant amounts of water under its very deep atmosphere. The robotic spacecraft Juno will help to unravel that mystery in 2016.

So take heart California, once you have drained the aquifer of the Central Valley, exhausted the Colorado River and Lake Mead, and drained every last ounce of water from the snow pack of the Sierra Nevada, look to the heavens. There’s water, water everywhere.