18th
March
2007
Mars under water!
Some of you may have seen the news that a large amount of water ice has been discovered hidden under Mars’ south pole. Supposedly this is enough to cover the entire surface of Mars to a depth of 10m. Pretty cool!
Of course this doesn’t make much sense, since water falls to the lowest point it can, so it’s reasonable to ask what Mars would look like if all this water flowed down to fill basins. I did a pretty naive approximation of this, the results of which are below.
First we start with a topography map of Mars, courtesy NASA:
This is an equirectangular projection, which makes math easy on us. Given the surface area of Mars, we know how much water is sitting around (in cubic meters) based on the above figure. If we assume that this could all sit on top of the dry Martian surface without it being sucked up like a sponge (doubtful), we can work out what height this would fill merely by subtracting away the terrain. This works out to a height of 90m, surprisingly enough. Mars seems to be pretty flat. So we can flood everything below that:
Then some false coloring and completely fictitious clouds for jazz:
Looks neat! I’d live there.
posted by saurabh in Arts & Crafts, Starry-eyed, The Future | 14 Comments
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