Underground Water on Mars?

WaltonNews wrote in with a story about possible underground water on Mars. The article begins: "The Mars Express spacecraft, from the European Space Agency (ESA), has indicated to scientists that the dry atmosphere and surface on the planet Mars does not necessarily mean Mars is dry underneath the surface. In fact, a huge storehouse of water and carbon dioxide could be found in underground reservoirs."

Lowell was right?

[BTWR]

Maybe there are canals on Mars, lol...

Try this link...

[aapold]

Mars Express scientists think Mars might have plenty of water underground [itwire.com.au].

I'm sure they'll fix the article soon. But tossing the quoted section into a news.google search provides this.

Not a new result

[amightywind]

This is not news worthy in the least. It has been several years since groundwater seeps have been observed by the MOC camera [msss.com] on Mars Global Surveyor.

MARSIS

[Nuffsaid]

Don't know where the link was supposed to go, but some (not really new) information can be found here [esa.int], along with a nice section of Mars North Polar Cap obtained with the remarkable Italian MARSIS [esa.int] instrument. Nice to see another world studied by geologists with just the same techniques used here on Earth.

Did I miss something, or did they?

[Speed Pour]

Seriously...there's been a decent number of sightings of ice water on Mars including European Space Agency [esa.int] and again recently with NASA [nasa.gov].

There's nothing new here. Stating a theory that perhaps less water has disappeared than previously thought? What's expected? Ice is known to have a lower planetary dispersion rate.

To add to all of this, it's scientifically reasonable to assume there should be fairly large quantities of water under the surface. Logic applies, we've seen landforms that support the belief of water having once been on mars, and we've got recent pictures to show some (likely a lot) is still there. Guess what, anybody who knows anything about dessert geography also knows that water naturally burrows below the surface. This is just putting 2+2 together.

What are they going to report on next, the discovery of Magnetic Fields and how they might exist on other planets?

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hit the link and got a /. URL, a 404. I looked at the links; one was a mailto and one was a bad /. URL (explaining the 404).

So if any of you want to actually RARFA (Read A Real Fucking Article), I suggest you try here. [newscientist.com] I saw this yesterday, I was very interested.

Maybe the article was about the gullies

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I recently attended a presentation by a geologist (areologist?) investigating the gullies [nasa.gov]. She argued convincingly that many of these are caused by liquid water erupting horizontally from aquifers about 100m underground. This water would lie about 100m below plateaus and the water would emerge from the side of steep faces. This is exactly where the gullies appear in photography and the 100m is consistent with the pressure and temperature required to keep wtar in a liquid state. On emerging to the surface the water would only last a few minutes before boiling and freezing. This is consistent with the length of the gullies. From what we know of the temperature of Mars these conditions aren't suitable for liquid CO2. The sinuosity of the gullies is inconsistent with landslides.

This is quite different from evidence from radar. We're talking about water that may have flowed in the last couple of years. (Not geological time. A few years here means less than ten.)