To Keep Water Liquid, the Red Planet Needed to Freeze

Mars has a curious past. Rovers have shown unequivocal evidence that liquid water existed on its surface, for probably at least 100 years. But climate models haven’t come up with how exactly that happened with what we currently understand about what the Martian climate was like back then. A new paper, published in the journal AGU Advances by Eleanor Moreland, a graduate student at Rice University, and her co-authors, has a potential explanation for what might have happened – liquid lakes on the Red Planet would have hid under small, seasonal ice sheets similar to the way they do in Antarctica on Earth.