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Mars honeycombed with frozen water

The Mars probe Odyssey has found huge frozen water deposits on the red planet's north pole. This image released on Thursday raises the hopes of those who believe life might have existed on Mars, since liquid water is a prerequisite for the development of Earth-type life. The blue shade shows the presence of water ice just below the planet's surface.

WASHINGTON June 27. The Martian north pole is honeycombed with frozen water, exceeding the ice deposits detected on Mars' southern end and raising hopes of finding traces of past microscopic life, astronomers reported.

The northern ice lies just below the Red Planet's surface, according to Bill Boynton of the University of Arizona, part of a team of U.S. and Russian scientists who made the discovery.

What they actually detected was hydrogen, which combines with oxygen to form water, but they spotted so much hydrogen that it could not have been anything else, Mr. Boynton said in a telephone interview yesterday. ``There's just so much of it (hydrogen), it can't be present in any other form,'' Mr. Boynton said. He explained that small amounts of water are normally present in rocks and soil on Earth, but on Mars' north pole, ``we're seeing amounts that are on the order of 80 to 90 per cent ice by volume.''

The ice is uniformly distributed throughout the Martian soil, he said. ``What we think ... is you could go almost anywhere in these high northern latitudes and dig down several inches (cm) to a foot or so and find ice there for you,'' Mr. Boynton said.

— Reuters

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