Comments on: The alien landscape of Mars’ north polar ice cap

By: Michael McNeil

Michael McNeil — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 12:20:40 +0000

The polar cap … is 600 miles across and a little less than 7,000 feet deep. It is made up of many seasonal layers, like the icecaps on Earth, with the bulk a mixture of water ice and cemented dust and sand. The very top layers, dubbed the residual icecap, is about three to six feet thick made up of frozen water having a volume about half of Greenland’s icecap.

The foregoing, quoted above from the previous article (which I haven’t checked), is worded perhaps imprecisely—because the top 3-6′ (“residual ice cap”) of the martian north polar ice cap, can’t possibly contain ~1/2 of Greenland’s mile-deep ice sheet. Instead, it’s the entirety of the water-ice in the (up to 3.7 km deep) “layered deposits” lying below the residual ice cap that add up to (perhaps a bit more than) half of Greenland’s ice.

By: Yngvar

Yngvar — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 09:43:28 +0000

No crisscrossing. All streaks in one direction. Prevailing wind?

By: Dick Eagleson

Dick Eagleson — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 21:31:30 +0000

Looks like nothing quite so much as a stuccoed wall. As our host is doubtless well aware, there is an area of elevated flatlands in the American Southwest known by the Spanish name Llano Estacado – the “staked plains.” Perhaps we could dub this Martian polar landscape in Spanglish as Llano Estuccodo – the “stuccoed plains.”