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Underground 'Lakes' on Mars May Just Be Big Globs of Clay - Gizmodo

Underground 'Lakes' on Mars May Just Be Big Globs of Clay - Gizmodo

Underground 'Lakes' on Mars May Just Be Big Globs of Clay - Gizmodo
Jul 30, 2021 56 secs

The researchers behind the study say that, rather than liquid water, the Martian south pole contains smectites, a class of clays that have been misinterpreted in the data.

Some research had identified what appeared to be subsurface lakes, but now a paper published this month in the Geophysical Research Letters argues the conditions around the south pole aren’t right for liquid water and that smectites are a more likely culprit for signals in the radar data.

This finding indicated that the south pole could be peppered with subsurface lakes; as study co-author and research scientist at NASA Jeffrey Plaut put it in a NASA press release at the time, “Either liquid water is common beneath Mars’ south pole or these signals are indicative of something else.” The recent paper suggests the latter.

There were immediately two problems with the idea that the subsurface structures could be liquid water lakes, as the new paper discussed.

The first problem was salt: It lowers the melting point of water, but a lot more salt than is expected in Mars would be needed in the south pole to help melt the ice.

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