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If all the ice was brought to the surface of Mars and melted, it would be enough to coat the entire planet with an ocean between 5 and 9 feet deep, according to a new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters revealing the discovery.
"We've explored the MFF again using newer data from Mars Express's MARSIS radar, and found the deposits to be even thicker than we thought: up to 3.7 km [2.3 miles] thick," Thomas Watters, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution, and author of the paper and the original research in 2007, said in an ESA statement.
The Medusae Fossae Formation is a section of Mars' surface consisting of billion-year-old wind-sculpted features and huge dust deposits, stretching over 3,000 miles along the planet's equator, bounding the cratered highlands of the south and the lowlands of the northern hemisphere.
"Given how deep it is, if the MFF was simply a giant pile of dust, we'd expect it to become compacted under its own weight," co-author Andrea Cicchetti of the National Institute for Astrophysics, Italy, said in the ESA statement.
These icy deposits aren't anything like the glaciers here on Earth, however, as they are heavily contaminated with Mars dust and topped with a crust of rock and ash that is hundreds of feet deep.
"Low latitudes are also very desirable for multiple reasons, the most important being temperature and solar energy due to the relatively high Sun angles.
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