polar express

The European Space Agency does take some nice pictures. (Click image for high-res version.)

These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, were released at the First Mars Express Science Conference this week. They show the areas of focused research - water, ice, glaciers and volcanism.

These two images of the Martian north polar ice cap show layers of water ice and dust for the first time in perspective view. […] Here we see cliffs which are almost 2 kilometres high, and the dark material in the caldera-like structures and dune fields could be volcanic ash.

More at National Geographic News, but this time about Mars's equatorial, rather than arctic, region.

The miles-wide, ice floe-shaped landforms in this new aerial view of Mars may be just that—ancient ice sheets. Noting their similarity to floes at Earth's poles, a team of European scientists speculates that an entire frozen sea is buried intact in this equatorial region. Released today by the European Space Agency, the image was captured by the agency's Mars Express spacecraft.

The scientists believe that a catastrophic event five million years ago sent subterranean water gushing onto the Martian surface, creating a sea. The red planet's frigid temperatures quickly turned the sea's surface to ice, which later broke up into the sheets seen buried above. Eventually the sea itself froze, and the entire region was later blanketed by dust, the researchers say.

Without the dust cover, the ice would have long since sublimated. But if the buried sea is really there, waiting to be tapped—Well: can anyone say terraforming?

Not in my lifetime, unfortunately.