Reviews, Earth's nearest neighbor undergoes climate change as well, and the Red Planet is much easier to understand, making it a perfect laboratory for studying how climate change works here, the Los Angeles Times reports.
"Mars, without oceans and without biology, is a more simple laboratory in a sense to understand the physics of climate," said Isaac Smith, the lead author on the study on Mars' climate
Mars is currently exiting its most recent ice age, though ice ages are different than they are on Earth. Here, ice gathers at the poles and higher elevations. But the Martian axis has a much wider wobble than that of Earth, which actually makes the temperature warmer at the poles when the tilt is at its most extreme.
That causes the frozen water at the poles to evaporate and regather at the planet's midsection.
"Right now Mars is ... the closest [to Earth] it's been in 13 years, and it's just this bright red jewel in the sky," Smith said. "But if you were to live half a million years ago or half a million years in the future, it would look kind of a pinkish color instead of red."
Smith said called his discovery a "lucky find" made while his team was studying swirling patterns carved in the ice by winds around Mars' north pole. During his examinations, he noticed that layers appeared to have been deposited across the ice cap in a uniform manner.
That indicated a sudden shift from erosion to deposition, the Times noted, and that meant that instead of the polar cap being carved constantly it instead was the recipient of massive amounts of water ice.
The researchers used the Shallow Subsurface Radar on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to look at the layers below the planet's surface. About 87,000 cubic kilometers of ice have built up at the poles since the previous ice age's end about 370,000 years ago. That would cover Mars' entire surface in 2 feet of ice.
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