The south pole of Mars shows that the Red Planet isn’t always dull, dusty, and barren

Mars south pole ice cap, rotated

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What you see here (in full gorgeous detail below) is an image of Mars’ south pole, captured by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter. It is distinctly different from the dusty, barren, not-attractive landscapes that we usually associate with the Red Planet, but it’s still most definitely Mars.

The image is a combination of blue, green, and infrared images captured by the Orbiter’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), assembled by Bill Dunford. The infrared channel slightly exaggerates the reds, but it’s pretty close to being “real.”

Mars southern polar ice cap, captured by ESA's Mars Express Orbiter

Mars southern polar ice cap, captured by ESA’s Mars Express Orbiter [Click to zoom in]

The huge white swirl in the middle is Mars’ permanent southern polar ice cap. It mostly consists of water ice, like the poles here on Earth. In the winter, as temperatures fall to around -153 Celsius (-243 F), carbon dioxide freezes, forming a few-meter-deep layer of dry ice. When the winter ends and sunlight strikes the dry ice, it sublimates into gas, creating massive winds that travel at 250 mph (400 kph). In the image below, captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO) HiRISE camera, the black splotches are believed to be explosive pock marks left behind by sublimating CO2.

Mars CO2 sublimation splotch marks

NASA’s MRO HiRISE captured these black splotches on Mars’ northern latitudes. They’re believed to be caused by CO2 explosively sublimating.

In the future, terraforming — the process of making a planet more conducive to human colonization — could melt the southern polar ice cap to create a vast amount of liquid water. Terraforming is a long, long way off, though — first we need to actually get some humans onto the surface of Mars. Having a source of fresh water on the surface of Mars is definitely one of the top reasons for settling on Mars instead of other planets, though.


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  • m0r1arty

    Alternatively we could just visit the D & M Pyramid, push down the button and really piss off Cohaagen!

  • Dozerman

    How long unitl someone nukes it in the name of teraforming?

    • James Tolson

      i think that 8 to 20 holes would need to be drilled deep into the crust of mars at equal locations around the planet, then massive nukes placed inside and sealed, then Detonated simultaneity, creating massive amounts of heat and shear energy directed at the planets core, hopefully restarting long dead geological activity warming the planet, and with any luck restarting the planets core to regenerate mars’s magnetic field.. that to me would be way to start Terra forming :-)

      • Dozerman

        I don’t think that would be necessary. I’m sure there’s enough CO2 in the caps to do the job. Without a magnetic field, the atmosphere could still last a few hundred thousand years by estimates I read somewhere. That would give it plenty of time to warm up and become inhabited while we figured out how to really start the magnetic field back up.

  • Abid Hussain

    Prothean Digsites FTW! o/ … lol!

    • Sean Vail

      Let’s wait till this reaper cycle passes and then we’ll go to the citadel just as they leave!

  • Joel Detrow

    “Fresh water” implies a low concentration of dissolved minerals. How do we know the Martian polar ice isn’t salty?

  • XenoSilvano

    the top two images look like an amalgam of different types of chocolate.

  • VirtualMark

    As much as I love astronomy, I just can’t imagine anything worse than living on Mars. You’d be cut off from the rest of humanity as you can’t have real time communication with Earth. The conditions are hostile – I like summer time, not minus 100 odd °C. No breathable atmosphere, you’d be confined to a bubble. I still can’t believe the amount of people who have signed up for this one way trip to Mars – have they really thought it through.

    That being said, I’d love to visit Mars if I could come back.

    • Jamie MacDonald

      People want their names in the history books. Jeez, look at reality TV, and they do dumb stuff like that for a mere 15 minutes of dubious “fame.”

      Plus there’s the culture of people constantly moaning that, “people suck and are all evil,” so if we can send those people to Mars, everyone’s happy.

  • Fernando Ortega

    I would like to see humans land on mars by a vehicle with a similar landing as curiosity , when the temperatures are in the middle. with that in mind build spacesuits out of kevlar . Then collect rocks and look for possible life then get launched or pulled back by a magnetic ship that will be sent to mars go around its orbit and then take the vechicle back to earth . The magnetic ship will release the magnetic force after the vehicle had entered earths atmosphere.