Mars has two miles of WATER buried at its equator – and scientists say it could support the Red Planet’s first settlers

Despite once being home to lush oceans of liquid water billions of years ago, all traces of H2O on Mars are well hidden today.

Now scientists have discovered three kilometers of water buried beneath the surface in an area around the planet’s equator known as the Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF).

According to new data from the Mars Express spacecraft, the water is frozen as ice in a layer more than 2.3 miles (3.7 kilometers) thick.

If the water were to melt, it would cover all of Mars in a layer of liquid up to 2.7 meters deep, which would be enough to fill Earth’s Red Sea.

Although melting the ice may require an ambitious drilling operation when astronauts land on Mars, it could potentially be used for drinking or growing crops.

The top of any ice-rich layers is at least 300 meters below the surface, but perhaps as much as 600 meters below the surface.

A paper on the new research by a group of international experts will be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“An ice-rich MFF deposit has important implications for Mars’ paleoclimate and could potentially be of great value to future human exploration of Mars,” said study author Thomas R. Watters of the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies in Washington. DC.

‘The MFF deposits are located on Mars’ equator, along the border between the northern lowlands and the heavily cratered highlands – an ideal landing site for spacecraft, as the lower elevation provides more atmosphere to slow a spacecraft’s descent.’

The MFF is a large geological formation of volcanic origin, approximately one-fifth the size of the continental United States.

In satellite images it appears smooth and gently undulating, but it has been formed into ridges and grooves partly by the wind.

These wind-shaped features are hundreds of kilometers wide and several kilometers high.

According to ESA, they may be the largest source of dust on Mars and one of the most extensive deposits on Earth.

More than fifteen years ago, Mars Express found enormous deposits up to 2.5 kilometers deep during the MFF, but it was not clear what those deposits actually were.

Now, new observations by the legendary spacecraft finally reveal an answer: frozen water.

“We re-explored the MFF using newer data from the Mars Express MARSIS radar and found that the deposits are even thicker than we thought – up to 2.3 miles (3.7 km) thick,” said Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution.

‘Excitingly, the radar signals match what we would expect from layered ice, and are similar to the signals we see from Mars’ polar caps, which we know are very ice-rich.’

Like other planetary orbiters, Mars Express can emit radar waves to gain insights about the subsurface that are not immediately visible to spacecraft cameras.

Initial observations from Mars Express in 2007 showed that the MFF was low in density and did not really reflect radar waves – both features typical of icy deposits beneath the surface.

At the time, however, scientists could not rule out the possibility that subsurface features were deep accumulations of windblown dust, volcanic ash or sediment.

Now the new radar data from Mars Express shows that the density of the features is too low for this – indicating water ice.

“Given how deep it is, we would expect that if the MFF were simply a giant pile of dust, it would be compressed under its own weight,” says Andrea Cicchetti of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy.

‘This would create something much denser than what we actually see with MARSIS.

“And when we modeled how different ice-free materials would behave, nothing reproduced the properties of the MFF.”

The scientists aren’t sure how long ago these ice deposits formed and whether they might be a remnant of Mars’ oceans.

But the MFF could be “a fascinating target for exploration by humans or robots,” says Colin Wilson, ESA project scientist for Mars Express.

‘The first settlers on this planet will almost certainly need a water source, and water ice on the surface would be ideal for that,’ he told MailOnline.

‘Unfortunately, the wetlands suggested by this new research are hundreds of meters underground, and thus inaccessible to colonists until we can get big drilling equipment to Mars.

“It appears that most of this Medusae Fossae area apparently formed more than 3 billion years ago, so massive glacial deposits could well date from that time.”

When NASA eventually puts humans on Mars – possibly in the 2030s – it will have to land on a watery part of the planet to keep them alive.

Scientists believe that the vast majority of water on Mars today is ice, although recent studies have suggested that liquid water is also present there in small quantities.

Liquid water is an essential ingredient for life, although its presence does not necessarily mean that life exists or existed on the Red Planet.

Professor Brian Cox told MailOnline in 2022 that the most advanced life to ever exist on Mars was probably single-celled organisms ‘at best’.

However, scientists agree that liquid water was once abundant on Mars.

About 4.3 billion years ago, the Red Planet had enough water to cover its entire surface with a liquid layer about 450 feet (137 meters) deep, NASA said.

Fast forward to 3.5 billion years ago, when this water was more scarce – it was channeled around the planet via rivers between crater lakes, just as it is on Earth today.

Liquid water may have last been present on Mars only 2 billion years ago, before the Martian atmosphere was lost and the liquid water evaporated.