Possible present day habitats for life on Mars (Including potential Mars special regions): Difference between revisions

This process could melt the ice for a few hours per day in the warmest days of summer, and melt a few mms of ice around each grain. For instance, Losiak, et al., modeled dust grains of basalt (2-200&nbsp;µm in diameter) if exposed to full sunlight on the surface of the ice on the warmest days in summer, on the Northern polar ice cap, and say this about their model, in 2014: "For example, for solar constant 350 W/m2, emissivity 0.80, grain size 2 um, and thermal conductivity 0.4 W/mK melting lasts for ~300 minutes [5 hours] and result in melting of 6 mm of ice."<ref>[http://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/metsoc2014/pdf/5314.pdf ICE MELTING BY RADIANTLY HEATED DUST GRAINS ON THE MARTIAN NORTHERN POLE] A. Losiak, L. Czechowski and M.A. Velbel, 77th Annual Meteoritical Society Meeting (2014)</ref> They developed this model as a hypothesis to explain presence of extensive deposits of gypsum in the Northern polar ice cap and the dune fields around it, and concluded that, since the atmospheric pressure there is just above the triple point, this mms thin layer of liquid water could persist for a significant period of time there around grains of basalt in the middle of the day in summer.

 

 

==Flow like features==