TOKYO: A huge, frozen sea lies just below the surface of Mars, a team of European scientists has announced.
Their assessment is based on pictures of the planet’s near-equatorial Elysium region that show plated and rutted features across an area 800 by 900km.
The team thinks a catastrophic event flooded the landscape five million years ago and then froze out.
They tell a forthcoming edition of Nature magazine that sediments covered the ice, locking it in place.
Large reserves of water-ice are known to be held at the polls on Mars but if this discovery is confirmed by follow-up observations, it would be a first for a region at such low latitude.
