Recent ice ages on Mars
@article{Head2003RecentIA, title={Recent ice ages on Mars}, author={James W. Head and John F. Mustard and Mikhail A. Kreslavsky and Ralph E. Milliken and David R. Marchant}, journal={Nature}, year={2003}, volume={426}, pages={797-802} }
A key pacemaker of ice ages on the Earth is climatic forcing due to variations in planetary orbital parameters. Recent Mars exploration has revealed dusty, water-ice-rich mantling deposits that are layered, metres thick and latitude dependent, occurring in both hemispheres from mid-latitudes to the poles. Here we show evidence that these deposits formed during a geologically recent ice age that occurred from about 2.1 to 0.4 Myr ago. The deposits were emplaced symmetrically down to latitudes of…
664 Citations
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Simulations of the retreat and growth of ground ice as a result of sublimation loss and recharge reveal forty major ice ages over the past five million years of Mars, and how the subsurface ice sheets could have evolved to the state in which the authors see them today is explained.
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- Environmental Science, Geology
- 2009
Two end‐member hypotheses have been proposed to account for the emplacement and distribution of ice in the near‐subsurface of Mars at mid to high latitudes during recent spin‐axis/orbital…
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- Physics, Environmental Science
- 2017
Excess ice with a minimum age of tens of millions of years is widespread in Arcadia Planitia on Mars, and a similar deposit has been found in Utopia Planitia. The conditions that led to the formation…
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- Environmental Science, GeologyNature
- 2004
Using the ice accumulation rates estimated from global climate model simulations, it is shown that, over the past ten million years, large variations of Mars' obliquity have allowed the formation of such metres-thick, sedimentary layered deposits in high latitude and polar regions.
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Mars is the only planet other than Earth in the Solar System that has a preserved nonpolar geological record of glaciation on its surface. Nonpolar ice deposits on Mars have been linked to variations…
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- Environmental Science, Geology
- 2014
Global climate models (GCMs) have been successfully employed to explain the origin of many glacial deposits on Mars. However, the latitude‐dependent mantle (LDM), a dust‐ice mantling deposit that is…
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- 2009
Exposed subsurface ice sheets in the Martian mid-latitudes
- GeologyScience
- 2018
Cliffs on Mars expose water ice sheets present just below the surface in many locations, and the vertical structure of Martian ice-rich deposits are expected to preserve a record of ice deposition and past climate.
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