Researchers peering at layered deposits on Mars’ south pole discovered what look like dozens of subsurface lakes, although a lot of them are in areas the place water could be frozen.

The analysis workforce measured the quantity of these deposits, which comprise alternating layers of mud, water ice, and frozen carbon dioxide—dry ice. The layers comprise the story of Mars’ climatological historical past; when the planet’s tilt was barely totally different, wintry situations shaped the frozen layers that scientists now examine utilizing surface-piercing radar. (Like Earth, Mars has its personal ice ages, the latest of which it emerged from 400,000 years in the past. Discover Magazine has a great explainer on how the planet’s tilt impacts its seasons and local weather.) The workforce’s outcomes have been published within the Geophysical Research Letters earlier this month, and so they comply with up on the 2018 finding of water ice beneath the planet’s south pole.

“We’re not certain whether these signals are liquid water or not, but they appear to be much more widespread than what the original paper found,” stated Jeffrey Plaut, a analysis scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an company statement. “Either liquid water is common beneath Mars’ south pole or these signals are indicative of something else.”

The radar, pointed at Mars from the MARSIS instrument aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter, bounces again in a different way relying on what materials it hits, and water is a powerful reflector of radar waves. The radar bouncing off the south pole got here again brilliant, proof that liquid water or water ice lies beneath. Water ice on Mars is outdated information at this level, however precisely how a lot if it exists there is unknown. In 2019, a large quantity of water ice was discovered below the North Pole, and former radar alerts hinted at a stretch of subsurface liquid water in a 6- to 12- mile swath of the planet’s south pole. But Plaut and his co-author, Aditya Khuller, discovered dozens of brilliant reflections throughout the pole throughout a wider area than beforehand realized, some which indicated the detections have been lower than a mile under Mars’ floor. But these detected areas additionally lie in frigid areas of about -81° Fahrenheit (-63° Celsius), that means the water could be frozen.

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Citing a paper from 2019 that investigated how liquid water might happen on the pole, Khuller famous that “it would take double the estimated Martian geothermal heat flow to keep this water liquid. One possible way to get this amount of heat is through volcanism. However, we haven’t really seen any strong evidence for recent volcanism at the south pole, so it seems unlikely that volcanic activity would allow subsurface liquid water to be present throughout this region.”

Maybe we’ll should set a rover or different probe down on the Martian south pole to raised discover the geophysics of these frozen recesses of the planet. In 1999, NASA’s Mars Polar Lander and its two probes, collectively referred to as Deep Space 2, went to Mars to just do this, but, sadly, the devices have been misplaced on arrival.

More: An Astounding Amount of Water Has Been Discovered Beneath the Martian North Pole