Scientists have discovered early morning frost on the summits of Martian volcanoes near the planet’s equator, indicating that water ice forms overnight in colder months and evaporates after sunrise. “While the frosty layer is exceptionally thin, it covers an enormous area,” reports The Guardian. “Scientists calculate that in the more frigid Martian seasons, 150,000 tons of water, equivalent to 60 Olympic swimming pools, condense daily on the tops of the towering mountains.” From the report: “It’s the first time we’ve discovered water frost on the volcano summits and the first time we’ve discovered water frost in the equatorial regions of Mars,” said Adomas Valantinas, a planetary scientist at the University of Berne in Switzerland and Brown University in the US. “What we’re seeing could be a trace of a past Martian climate,” Valantinas said of the frost-tipped volcanoes. “It could be related to atmospheric climate processes that were operating earlier in Martian history, maybe millions of years ago.”
Valantinas spotted the frost-capped volcanoes in high-resolution colour images snapped in the early morning hours on Mars by the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). With colleagues, he confirmed the discovery using a spectrometer on TGO and further images taken by the agency’s Mars Express orbiter. The frost appears as a bluish hue on the caldera floors and is absent from well-lit slopes. […] [W]riting in Nature Geoscience, the researchers describe how Martian winds may blow up the mountainsides and carry more moist air into the calderas where it condenses and settles as frost at particular times of year. Modeling of the process suggests the frost is water ice as the peaks are not cold enough for carbon dioxide frost to form.
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